Yet another factor that is critical to any businesses online (or offline for that matter) success is tracking. You really need to keep track of where your leads and traffic come from so you can replicate and scale any success you have.
To be really effective, tracking should be a big part of every business decision you make. For instance leasing billboard space is great, but unless you can track the business that comes from that billboard – you’re really performing a branding activity. And most of the time, the ROI of branding can not be tracked.
Google.com/voice is a great place to get a free phone number you can forward to your main number. It comes with call tracking so you can see how many people called that number. Kall8.com is a similar service for 800 numbers, but is $2/month. It’s a good idea to have a trackable number on your advertising, e-mail signature, and business cards.
Google Analytics is a free tracking suite that will give you each and every statistic you could possibly need for tracking visitors on your website.
By watching closely what people do on your website, you’ll be able to craft an experience that gets visitors to act in exactly the manner you’d like them to.
And don’t forget to use trackable domain names on postcards,and mailings. If your website is Goodgrades.com, send people to good grades.com, moregoodgrades.com, goodgradesinschool.com – just have them all redirected to your website and track who comes via that path. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if anyone read your postcard?
I know it’s silly, but anything you have to cut out and bring in to your store to redeem is an event you can tie to an activity. Send 100 postcards and get 10 coupons in the store, you’ll know it was 10% effective. That works for coupon codes, too.
Going back to Mistake #1, if you want somebody to fill out a contact form, you need to find a way to get them to your contact page. Watch how people interact with your website, then use that as a cue for where to add links to the pages you want visitors to visit the most.
If you have any questions, why not give me a call or drop me an email? We can discuss your web presence, let you know where it stands and tell you how we can help you to make it even better! For more information on niche internet marketing success click here!