August 05, 2014
Google Analytics is a free product offered by Google and installed by web developers to the public for the purposes of collecting visitor data from your website and to provide a view on who comes to your site, what they are doing when there, when they come and why they visited your site. It provides insight into how visitors are using your website.
All the data that Google collects can be overwhelming to most people but the good news is that they provide some easy to use out of the box reports that ae of critical importance. This article will focus on the top three metrics that every marketer has to know in order to properly gauge the success of their Google strategy.
First, is the Traffic Sources Analytic which shows an overview of how many people visited your site and where that they came from. The most important number to look at is search traffic. A good search traffic rating should be above 50 percent. This report breaks down traffic in the following categories:
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Search Traffic – Found your website using a search engine (i.e.Google).
Referral Traffic – Clicked on a link from another website that linked back to you.
Direct Traffic – Typed your URL in the browser.
Campaigns – Visits that are tracked through pre-defined campaigns.
Second, Organic Search traffic shows what keywords visitors used to find your website. This report will help you measure the success of your search engine optimization campaign. This report will show you what other keywords you may be missing that should be included in your campaign and what nonstandard terms are being used. This can help when excluding terms that are not relevant but close. For example Glasses may not work for an Optometrist but “Eye Glasses” would
Third, Bounce rate vs. Exit Rate tell us a lot about the performance of specific pages because they let us know when pages aren’t performing well. Bounce Rate is the measurement of the percentage of visitors who landed on a single webpage and then left without visiting any other pages. To be measured in the bounce rate a visitor must have come to your website, only looked at the one page, and then left your website immediately.
Exit Rate measures the percentage of visitors to a single webpage that click away and completely leave the website. For a visitor to be measured in the Exit Rate they must have come to your website, visited multiple pages, and then left.
In addition to these there are other metrics that may be of higher importance to your organization or client. These three represent the most important factors in measuring the success of your site and its ability to have customers find it and most of all stay there once they do.
Brad Tornberg
“When addressing company issues, the philosophy has to be business first,
technology second.”
Brad Tornberg is an entrepreneur who understands the challenges facing businesses struggling with technology and lead/sales generation. His 25 years of working with more than 150 businesses (typically with C-level executives) to provide consulting, strategy development, project planning/management, business process/workflow evaluation, and computer systems/software implementation has taught him that the problem within most organizations losing profitability isn’t so much about broken technology as it is about broken people, systems, and processes.
A successful technical and business expert with an MBA in Economics and Finance from Farleigh Dickinson University, Brad is the founder of E3 Consulting and holds Microsoft Certifications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sales, implementation, and training. He’s also earned his E-commerce certification from LaSalle University, Programming certification from the Chubb Institute and AT&T, and Great Plains Dynamics Instructor Certification, and was the first worldwide Exact/Macola Software Certified consultant in Manufacturing & Distribution.
Past positions have included Senior Consultant/Project Management at Microsoft; CEO and Principal at Front2back Solutions, IMS, and Sofsearch; and Director of Business Development at Wavebend. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and believes his exposure to many different industries throughout the course of his career allows him to bring best practices to the table in his consulting today.
Brad has seen his role “morph” in recent years. When he first started with E3 Consulting, he analyzed business needs; recommended, sold, and implemented software solutions; and trained companies on how to use them. As he was asked to fix technological problems, he began to see that the real “pain points” were with people and systems, and started to build up a respected reputation as being more of a consultant than a “techie”. He realized that firms needed a system for lead generation, not just a database for contacts.
With his recent certification as a Duct Tape Marketing Consultant and the formation of Market Simplicity as an adjunct of E3 Consulting, Brad is strategically taking on the role of a marketing consultant rather than viewing it as an add-on to his
“techie” role. He continues to embrace technology, but insists it must be interpreted in the proper light. Finding someone who knows both business and technology is like finding a needle in a haystack. Brad is that guy. He has always been systems-
oriented and found Duct Tape Marketing to be attractive because it’s a simple turnkey system providing focus and a marketing anchor. Duct Tape principles can be implemented using any type of software.
Brad believes in rolling up his sleeves and doing whatever’s necessary to get the job done. He also believes in integrity. On one occasion he was hired as project manager for a very profitable job. Upon completion of the assignment, his client sent him to other sites to do additional work. Brad quickly realized the client didn’t need what he thought he needed, and talked himself out of a $1 million contract by telling the client he could choose an alternate route for 1/3 of the time and 1/8 of the cost. Because of such honesty, Brad has now been doing business with that company for over 10 years. His belief is that even if it hurts you in the short-term, integrity is the most important part of doing business.