Analyze with Ease by using Google Analytics

Remember in college, how everyone talked about SMART goals? When online marketing started, it was incredibly hard to set a SMART goal. I am sure the fact that you weren’t able to create a SMART goal woke you up in the middle of the night, but I am happy to tell you that the nightmare is over. There are now tools within SEO methods that have made it easier to create SMART goals. It still comes with challenges but certain tools, such as Google Analytics, have made a marketer’s job easier. Harlo Media is a website design company uses Google Analytics on a daily basis to provide their clients with quantifiable results.

Be Specific

Especially when using online marketing, you need to be specific. There are many broad goals you could choose within an online marketing campaign. Do you want to decrease your average bounce rate? Maybe the way to do that is by making sure your website is being clicked on by people who are truly your audience. Want to increase the time spent on you website? Maybe you need more blog entries so people have more reading options. Google Analytics allows you to see bounce rate, time spent on website, whether the viewers came from an organic search or PPC (Pay per click), the average amount of pages visitors look at, the amount of visits, and the count of new visitors. When setting a marketing goal, pick one or two of these aspects to improve on.

Measurable Results

This is the one people find most difficult. Measurability online has many challenges, however by using Google Analytics you will be able to see a daily, monthly, and even yearly changes. You can keep track of when you get spikes in traffic to your website and many other trends. Was it after you created a new blog and sent it out to your readers. Or was it after you hosted a networking event? Keeping track of what creates buzz on your website and what other efforts you are making will help you connect the dots of what is working and what isn’t working.

Achievable Goals

Your goals of course should be achievable. Think about what factors you can control and which ones you can’t. You can’t control how long people are on your website, but you can control the content on your website, how many key words you use on each page, or how many directories you are listed on. Another great use of Google Analytics is tracking the key words you use, and the search engines you rank on. You can also see where most of your organic search traffic comes from.

Relevant Content

You want your goals to be relevant to whatever is going on in your business. Are you hosting a networking event? Maybe you want to increase traffic flow to your event page through social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook. Through Google Analytics, you can track how people are linking to your website. If you notice that a lot of people link to your home page from Twitter, maybe you want to increase your tweets.

Timely

Of course setting a time frame to have your goals met is always a good idea. Having a goal such as increasing your organic traffic by 5% in the next four months is an example of a goal you might want to use. Google Analytics gives you a daily overview, a monthly overview and a yearly overview. You can see and compare your progress with previous months and even the previous year. This allows you to see the progress you’ve made in the set time period you determined. You will sleep peacefully know you are not throwing money into the Social Media bag without any gain from it.

Harlo Media Inc., a website design company, sets strategic internet marketing goals and monitors effectiveness through Google Analytics. Harlo uses analytics software to interpret website performance and identify the most successful strategies. They empower their clients by teaching them how to monitor and fine-tune their websites and use Google Analytics to quantify results.

By Andrea Wilson, Harlo Media Inc. Team. For more information about Harlo Media please call or email Cody Galloway at 503.517.8074/cody(@)harlomedia.com or visit www.harlomedia.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 6:41 pm and is filed under News Room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.