WordPress and Google Analytics Equals more Customers

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Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere you are sure to have heard the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) at least a few thousand times. While improving your overall search engine ranking and having your site optimized to maximize the amount of traffic is obviously of critical importance, more traffic is not everything. Yes, that is what I said and I will say it once more for those who weren’t sure they heard me say it: Increased Website Traffic through Search Engine Optimization is not everything!

The other side of that solution and equally as important is your website conversion rate. Your websites conversion rate is nothing more than a fancy way of saying the percentage of visitors (website traffic) who make a purchase; sign up for a newsletter; download a report or whatever your call to action may be.

Let’s face it, if you have thousands of people visiting your site on a daily basis with exactly none of them making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter or whatever your call to action may be, does it really matter that you had all of that traffic?

To know if your website is really producing the results you are looking for ask yourself a few questions:

*What is your website traffic conversion rate?

*Do you have the website traffic statistics to measure the effectiveness of your website traffic?

*What is the increase in your business as a direct result of increased website traffic?

*What is the return on your investment (ROI) of your website promotion efforts?

If you didn’t have answers to my questions, you’re not alone. Despite the importance of web site conversion, I found that it’s one of the least understood measurements among the small business owners.  In short I am talking with business owners and network marketers who thought getting a web site would improve their bottom line, but ended up being disappointed by the lack of results.

One of the first places that I would recommend starting in order to get a grasp on your website traffic, your conversion rates and the overall performance of your website is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service that Google offers to its customers to allow them to track, monitor and measure with great accuracy statistics relating to traffic, conversions and page views on your web site. In short, Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create a higher converting website.

Other important information that you can obtain is the profitability of your keywords across different search engines and online campaigns. How about being able to identify where your best online customers come from and which target audiences are the most profitable for your specific content?

In fact, Google Analytics allows you to track all of your marketing initiatives. Measure the effectiveness of your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, search engines, and keywords, thereby allowing you can compare performance across all of your marketing efforts.

The best thing is that with a well design WordPress website and a simple plugin it is easy to add Google Analytics to your website. Where many small business owners now have to call up their web designer to make a simple addition like Google Analytics to their website, with a WordPress based website you have just avoided that challenge.

After creating your account, to make Google Analytics work you only need to place the special snippet of code that Google provides you in the Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress website.

One of my favorite features of Google Analytics is the identification of critical pages and bottlenecks where you are likely to lose most of your online customers. Funnel Visualization, shows you the bottlenecks in your conversion and checkout processes that are often attributable to such factors as confusing content or confusing navigation.  Once identified you can eliminate the problem content and/or create less confusing navigation and start “funneling” visitors through the steps you want them to take.

Additionally, Google Analytics comes a large number of predefined reports to assist you with the analysis of your website traffic data.

Are you already an advertiser with Google? You can immediately log in into Google Analytics and start using these tools right from the start. Google Analytics automatically imports all your existing keyword data from your AdWords account. In this way you can see the ROI and other key metrics for every keyword you buy on AdWords, without any extra setup.

My guess is that by now you are starting to understand the importance of combining Google Analytics with your WordPress website.  As I bring this to a close I will leave you with a few of the huge benefits to combining Google Analytics with your WordPress Website:

* Zero cost. Take note that the free version is limited to 5 million page views a month. However, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited page view tracking.

* Great visual maps, stats, reporting and great use of effective information design principles. Navigating data is a strong point.

* Ease of use: Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers, yet provides all the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.

*AdWords integration. If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface.

The benefit s to making use of Google Analytics is much longer than the few benefits I have listed above, but I think you get the picture. Now that you have a clear understanding of how to start measuring the effectiveness of your website I think it is time that we turn our attention to website traffic conversion. In my next article I am going to dive further into the challenge of converting your website traffic to prospect, leads and/or new customers.

Have any questions regarding the above information please feel free to leave a comment or contact me HERE.

To Your Success!

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Tagged as: Add new tag, generate prospects, Google, Google Analytic, Google Analytics, lead generation, leads, marketing, prospecting, prospects, Search Engine Optimization, small business wordpress, Web search engine, Web traffic, website traffic, website traffic conversion, Wordpress, wordpress plugin