It’s hard to know if your online marketing efforts are “working” unless you’re measuring results. Many smaller businesses without a full-time marketing director have a hard time making analytics reporting an ongoing tool in their marketing arsenal. But making it part of your marketing program is essential. What should you be tracking?

Website Visits:

How many unique visitors your site attracted

Pageviews:

How many individual pages within the site were visited

Pages/Visit:

How many pages the average visitor went to throughout the site

Bounce Rate:

What percentage of visitors left right away

Time on Site:

How many minutes the average visitor spent looking through your site

New Visits:

How many visitors have never been to the site previously

Traffic Sources:

Know how many of your visitors are being directed to your website through “organic search”, meaning  your site content, keywords, and good search engine results led them there. Tracking what other websites have sent you referral traffic is also important – when you know what sites can and do refer you business, you can start looking for more similar sites to generate more traffic and leads.

Geographic Location of Visitors:

You can analyze the specific towns your visitors are from. This can be especially important for businesses needing to pinpoint their marketing to very specific locations and target markets.

Mobile Devices:

You can see how many visits were made from mobile devices, and from which ones. Is your website mobile-friendly? It really needs to be.

Having a mobile version of your website is crucial as the number of people using mobile devices to surf the internet may soon outstrip desktop searches.