Creating a website, and carving out a space online for your brand is all but essentially these days. Everybody who is anybody has an online presence and specifically targeted online advertising campaigns as well as social communities, and social media personas. With Canadians averaging more than 45 hours of time spent online per month (more than double the global average), online might be the single best way to reach your Canadian audience. Online marketing, and cultivating an online presence for your brand can be an arduous task. That task can be made all the more daunting if you’re unsure of how your online marketing efforts are being translated into profitable consumer interactions. Without a system of measure being in place, a return on your time investment may never be evident. Further, without measurement, there is no frame of reference in terms of what works and what doesn’t work, or how a particular facet of your online marketing strategy has affected your target audience. That is why using website analytics as part of your online marketing campaign is completely necessary.
Website analytics is a way of measuring how your online marketing campaign is being received and can offer the user a multitude of different measures designed to explain who is viewing your site, for how long, from where etc. Some very precise parameters can be used to give the user a much clearer picture of their audience in terms of who their audiences is, what bits of content their audience found useful (providing a learning experience in terms of what works and what doesn’t), how long their audience is spending on the website, and how much content their audience is flipping through (i.e. looking at more on the website than just their landing page).
When it comes time to take stock of what you have done, what benefit is there in measurement? By stopping periodically to measure how your online marketing efforts are being received, you provide yourself with valuable training opportunities as you discover what works and what doesn’t work. By utilizing analytics to see how well a particular bit of content was received, you quickly figure out what your audience connects with and what they ignore completely. Perhaps a funny video posted to show case your high end line of men’s clothing wear which depicts a series of ferrets modelling ferret sized versions of your clothing line did very well and showed a record high for your website where as a long three part blog about double reinforcing seams showed record lows for engagement. You could look at this data, and from there keep going with your videos and limit the number of dry three part blogs about the mechanics of clothing manufacturing posted on your site.