“If you build a website and no one can find it does it still exist?”
Or are you on the road to Nowhere!
If your website isn’t visible it is hard to validate return on investment, purpose, or the marketing department. Just kidding about the marketing department but it does make one ponder their existence if your website has no visitors and can’t be found when someone is looking for the products or solutions your company provides.
How many people visit our website weekly?
Are the visitors prospects or random visitors?
What pages did they visit and how long did they stay on our site?
Can we track who visited the site and capture their names or email addresses?
What keywords or phrases did they use to find our website?
What country, state, or city did they come from?
What type of device did they use to view our site? Desktop, tablet, or phone?
What channel did they use? Direct, social media, directory, search?
What time of day did they visit?
Were they male or female?
What was their average age?
Did they fill out any of our forms?
Did they click on any of our products?
Did they order anything?
Did they come back for a second look?
Enough is enough but unlike traditional marketing it is fairly easy to track prospects and
customers online and determine the effectiveness of your online activities.
How much does it cost
to collect
visitor information?
It is Free!
How does a business owner collect this information?
Connect to the most comprehensive information database for your website!
As a business owner you should know about this simple solution but if your business expertise is not technology you may not of heard of it or realize the potential for your business. It is hard to believe but some marketing executives haven’t heard of it.
When I originally started to focus my business on (SEO), search engine optimization, I called a friend of mine that owns a sizable marketing firm. The firm has been handed down from the owner’s father and was built on traditional marketing solutions. Magazines, newspapers, television, billboards, and other print media. They were listing website creation and SEO on their website also. Being interested in what they were doing with SEO I asked him. The reply was; “we just design the website, there is no need for SEO if we do that correctly.” I asked what about Google Analytics and Local Listings? Both critical to get visitors and understand traffic. Rather than answer he told me that, “no-one is going to believe me at my age that I know anything about technology”. Since he is as old as I am it seemed that he was using that for an excuse of why he didn’t know about technology.
My Point. Don’t necessarily believe your marketing firm or marketing executives know anything about the fast moving technology that business owners can leverage to increase sales and save money over traditional marketing and business development. Worse case make their marketing and business development efforts more effective.
The website visitor data solution:
There are many but many are built on the foundation of Google Analytics. Since more than 90 % of online searches originate with Google it makes sense that Google has data on those searches on their servers. Even more amazing is that Google will provide you with that data for free. Actually, nothing is free, but if you play along with them and put a tracking code on your website they will collect the data for you. And of course for them.
How do you get the Google Analytics tracking code on your website?
Ask your webmaster, service provider, marketing department or who ever has responsibility for maintaining your website to do it!
If you are a typical business owner you are concern with what this is going to cost to set this up. Normally set-up can be done in less than 30 minutes by your technical person. Here is what they have to do.
Establish a Gmail address for your company if you don’t have one. Don’t worry it doesn’t have to be @gmail.com. Google will let you set up a company address like mine [email protected] or [email protected] as a gmail address. They just insist on one for signing up for Google Analytics account which is the first step.
Steps to set-up Google analytics on your website :
Set up Google Analytics account with gmail address.
Google assigns a UA number to be placed on website.
Use one of 4 ways listed on Google analytics site to do this.
Verify the Google analytics account is connected.
(Learn or have someone learn how to use GA for reporting!)
Connect to Google Ads or AdSense if using them.
