Master the Art of Impressions

By: Scott Jemison
Contributing Writer

A good analytics program can provide you with a wealth of information for determining your success at online marketing. There are an infinite number of combinantions and segmentations of data to interpret, providing you information about visitors and the quality of your web pages.

What's missing? How do you determine as a business owner whether you are getting your message to your customers? When you are paying for every click it is vital to put your message in front of potential clients, not accidential traffic.

If you are using the correct keywords the number of impressions your keywords receive becomes a good indicate of the potential traffic for your product. Too many people dismiss impressions as merely a factor of click-thru.

The number of impressions is a good indicator of powerful keyword choice. A low level of impressions with low click-thru could indicate a poor choice of keyword, indicating a limited audience for your offering. On the other hand, a low level of impressions with a high click-thru is a good indicator of niche marketing.

A well handled PPC campaign can provide you with as much insight into the marketplace as any analytics program. The key is to pay close attention to every metric and learn from each to adjust your campaign to maximize the return on your investment.

Are You Wasting Time with Google Analytics

Over the past couple of years, Google Analytics has become the most popular analytics program to measure how your website is performing. Once a website is launched, you need start to understand where you are getting the best traffic from, to learn how the potential client is entering the site or exiting, and what keywords drive the site. The whole point is to have huge amounts of traffic and be making more money, Right?

But before you start reviewing the stats and the performance of the website, you will need to concentrate on how the program will benefit your business. Google Analytics can track all online campaigns, from keywords to emails, search engine traffic and referral sources. Also, if you have an Adwords Campaign, you have direct interface to calculate the ROI metrics and keyword tracking of data. This can improve the campaign and save you money in the end, by ensuring you are targeting the right clients.

In the very beginning, you may not be impressed with initial results and your number of keywords may seem very small. But in time, you will start seeing results -- more keywords listed in organic search due to your expanding optimization of the website. There is opportunity to improve the website and add additional content based on the target keywords in the program. Targeting newer clients and expanding the website's content areas which show interest may improve your readership.

Even though it is completely free of charge, Google Analytics offers more functionality then some of the paying tracking tools on the market. If you're new to the program, you may want request that the web developer review the stats reports for the first year or login at a regular time of the month to review the progress of the website. This gets you more involved and gives you more of an understanding of how to read the reports, target the ad campaigns, or create those special sales that drive the site during certain times of the year.