Measure online results better with a Web Analytics Dashboard

Web marketing can be extremely rewarding for businesses that do it well. The problem is that most organisations have trouble combining all of their necessary web analytics in order to understand how they’re performing and where they can improve. What they need is a web analytics dashboard.

Web marketing analytics can be complicated and whilst tools such as Google Analytics are good, most busy corporate marketers don’t have time to sift through the data for the answers. When you’re tracking dozens of keyword search terms in your SEO program, monitoring traffic from multiple social networks, managing lots of landing pages and trying to quantify leads it can get messy and opportunities can be missed.

A Web Analytics Dashboard is the answer.

We favour a simple dashboard that can display the following:

• Keyword performance in real-time

• Link Opportunities

• Page Optimisation

• Twitter campaigns

• Activity feed of visitors and their source

• Real time alerts on leads and changes in search rankings and competitors

• A 30 Day Snapshot of visitors, leads, conversion rate and page views.

…….all on one page.

This dashboard then allows you to drill deeper into each area to discover even more valuable information and produce professional reporting.

• Monthly search term volumes for desired search engine

• Visitors per search term

• Leads per search term

• Top linked pages

• Who is linking to you and who has stopped linking to you

• Top landing pages

• Optimisation issues per page

• Twitter campaign results with traffic, leads and pages viewed

Best of all it can show which companies visited your website (in real-time), their location, how long they stayed, which pages they looked at and how they arrived at your website (search term, direct, referral).

It is an amazing marketing tool allowing you to make sense of all your data and concentrate on more effective online marketing and an integral component in a 360 Degree Digital Marketing Strategy.

Like to know more about having a Web Analytics Dashboard tailored to your online marketing objectives?

Great content is the key to successful online marketing.

Sure you can try to optimise a web page for almost any search term, but without great content it probably won’t deliver the desired results. Search engines like Google are increasingly trying to promote popular, relevant content over heavily optimised pages. Even if you succeed in ranking high on Google and visitors click through to your page, they’ll leave again within seconds if the content doesn’t satisfy their needs or engage them in some way.

Sure you can embrace social media and share your web page on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, but without great content you won’t get many visits or re-shares. You online friends have a reputation to protect too. They are only going to share content they think others will appreciate.

Sure you can have traffic conversion strategies and forms all over your website or Facebook page, but without great content you probably won’t have motivated, interested visitors taking the next step.

Content is at the heart of our 360 Degree Digital Media Strategy. We encourage organisations to set their information free as part our Content Marketing Plan. Most organisations have a story to tell. Most have filing cabinets full of reports, data, statistics and other information that would be useful or relevant to their potential customers. We say “dig it out and use it.”

So before you start a link building strategy, before you try to grow your Facebook Fans or Twitter followers, before you begin emailing that database and before designing that contact form……create some content that will delight, engage, motivate or inform your potential customers. Then create some more. Its the first step towards online success.

Here’s some more great content about the need for great content from the team at Content+ in the UK.

Australian’s will spend $13 billion online this year. Half of us will spend around 75% of our total shopping time doing online research. Over 90% of us will start our research with a search engine like Google. Around 75% of us have a Facebook account and 49% of internet users have a Twitter account.

Most organisations have a business plan but they don’t seem to have one for online where more and more business is actually taking place. They don’t have a website business plan.

Its seems that, despite the compelling facts around online behaviour, most organisations set about designing and developing websites with very little strategic planning. Sure, they look at branding, navigation and all the usual generic information. Sure, they draw up an impressive looking sitemap. But that’s not a plan.

A professional website business plan should address the following questions:

• What are your core objectives?

• Who are your target markets?

• Who are your competitors and what are they doing online?

• What are you opportunities online?

• How well are you resourced for a successful online presence?

• What are / will be your communications options?

Our recommended approach to web design and development is to actually start at the end; the core objectives and calls-to-action. By knowing these you can then create a strategy designed to deliver these results taking into account:

• Content

• Social media

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)

• Conversion strategies

• Database management

Your website can be one of your most valuable business assets. As such, it deserves the sort of strategic planning that will deliver great results for many years. Don’t begin with a logo and some cool graphics; a website business plan should be your starting point. Its all part of effective 360 Degree Digital Marketing.