So now you have invested some of your hard earned cash into
advertising online for your wedding business.
You are still not quite sure if your investment was worth it but you are
anxious to find out. I always encourage
any advertiser on any of our websites to check this information to insure they
are getting the value from advertising with us.
You could take a number of approaches to begin to track the return on
your investment. We will cover a few of those approaches today.
What, you are not tracking your investment? Shame on you!!! It is your money. Don’t be throwing it away needlessly or “hope
that it is working”. I have personally
heard some wedding vendors say “I don’t have time to track my visitors to see
where they are coming from”. But those
same vendors had the time to fill out all the forms, do an online profile, and
either fill out a check or do a Paypal/Credit Card payment. If you are not going to check up on your
investment, like anything else, you are wasting your money for online
advertising. You need to spend at least 5
minutes a week (and that is all it takes) to see if you are getting what you
paid for.
You could ask your bride how they found out about you? Of course she is going to tell you “the
internet” and have the foggiest idea which web site. Or you can even put a form on your website to
ask that question and I am sure the bride will fill it out (yeah right). You can even ask your advertising portal
(that you paid) to send you statistics (I have some Ocean Front property in Palm
Springs to sell you also). Last but not least, you can not rely on
someone else and see for yourself how people are or are not finding your
business online. Today I am going to
cover one simple and FREE way to track your
visitors. I will try to hit more ways in
future blog posts…which may be converted to Word Press soon BTW.
Let’s not be confused by visitors to your listing and
visitors to your website. One of the
sales approaches by some of the big names is them telling you the amount of
visitors to your listing. Visitors to
your listing don’t mean diddly if they are not going to your website, where you
are really selling your business. Let’s find out who is coming to your
website.
We'll go to our old friend Google. They have something called Google
Analytics. It is FREE
(my favorite price), easy to install, easy to read for our purpose, and an
easy overall way to track your online advertising investment. Sign up for the Google Analytics
account. Once you have your account
established, you will need to place a single line of code into your HTML to track
your visitors. You copy and paste this one
line of code in the header of your web page(s).
If you have a webmaster taking care of your site, he should be able to
do this for FREE for you or at the most
charge you $5.00. If you have a Word
Press web site, there are Plug Ins you can get (for free) that will let you put
this code in. The All In One SEO plug in
does this for you. Once you have the
code installed, wait a week or so until Google begins to track some statistics
for you.
After you waited a week, log into your Google Analytics
account. It may appear like information
overload, but that is OK. We can look
at all the other tools later. Right now
we are only interested in where our visitors are coming from. We can get to the rest of the features
later. On the
left, you are going to look for the “Traffic Sources” tab where you will get an
overview. Click on Traffic Sources to
open it up. Then click on All
Traffic. You will get a view of where
all of your website traffic is coming from.
The search engines may be first but other sites that refer people to you
may be in that list also. Hopefully the
site that you paid money to, will be high on that list.
Next click on the Referrals tab. Here you will find a list of sites that sent
people to your website. One again, take
a look at what sites sent people to your website. You will also seed how long visitors spent on
your site and how many pages of your site they viewed. There is all kinds of other information that
is there, but we can get into all of the other information in a later blog
post.
But there you have it.
A total of 5 minutes spent on who sent visitors to your web site. I surely hope that the advertising portal you
spent money with for your online advertising is sending you visitors and customers. If so, great and keep checking this as your
money was well spent. If not, it may be
time to reconsider just where your advertising dollars are going.
Until next time…..
John
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