Published by:
Ken Scovill
Introduction
When I first started online a couple of years ago all of the research that I read
and respected clearly indicated that once you had your marketing ‘system’ in
place (sales page, opt-in page, thank you / download page, and various
advertising campaigns) it was absolutely critical that you Track Your Results.
After all, how can you possibly know how well you are doing if you don’t have any
idea where your customers are coming from? How long do they stick around?
What parts of your website are they interested in? How many click through to
which of your offers? What percentage sign up for your newsletter or special
offer? Do they then follow through with the confirmation process? Download?
You get the picture.
Also the experts all recommend A/B split testing on the various elements of your
system in order to see what works best and improve conversions on sales and
opt-ins. Get your first advertisement, sales letter, or squeeze page out there.
Then start alternating in slightly different versions with varying headlines, colors,
bullets, etc. Stick with the best performer and try it again with another variation.
And how do you know which one performs the best? Track Your Results.
Now comes the interesting part… (drum roll please). No one ever really tells
you HOW to do this. It’s not exactly a glamorous subject.
Initially, I tried using the statistics that my web hosts provided. I quickly
discovered that their information was very generic, hard to understand and
virtually useless.
I tried to figure it out by observing what some of these experts were doing but
there is unfortunately little guidance out there. Luckily, I absolutely love looking
at case studies. And in good case studies, they usually share their traffic
results. While there are tons of basic web statistics programs out there I noticed
that the case studies examples usually came from versions of AWstats (an open
source program) or statcounter (offers both free and paid versions).
As time has gone on I’ve noticed more and more have been switching over to
Google Analytics. Google purchased a statistics program a number of years ago
called ‘Urchin’ and converted it to use with their abundance of data. A great
combination. The only problem is that Google’s instructions tend to be a bit
convoluted and confusing, often offering much more information than necessary
and ultimately confusing the issue. To me, this really makes it difficult to get
started.
Oh, if only there was a set of straight-forward, simple instructions to help basic
Internet Marketers track what is going on in their world using a comprehensive
and free tool such as Google Analytics?
That is the purpose of this report.
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