Tracking Your Marketing Efforts

grrlduda

As entrepreneurs we find several ways to get our name out to our target audience. But to learn from our efforts, we also need to stay on top and track results/stats, if at all possible. Maybe you conduct a postcard campaign, you tell people to download something of value to them from a specific area of your website. For an article you`ve written, you direct people to sign up to your mailing list. You`ve invested in sponsored search engine listings. All have a way of measuring results.Now how have you been tracking your efforts? Anyone care to share your methods? (Please don`t say post it! Eeek) Excel spreadsheets?

SnoMon

Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics).  As far as online marketing goes, this is very powerful tracking...and it is free and easy to implement!
SnoMon2007-1-12 8:23:43

Chuck

Any of these tools - search marketing systems, analytics tools, etc - provide solid reporting capabilities that you can tailor and use to track the metrics which matter to you (and those will vary from business to business). It`s hard to get away from having to export reports to Excel though, and do the work of generating more detailed and insightful reports that answer questions not covered in the basic packages you get from many tools.The key is to automate that second half of the process as much as possible - using macros and other tools available to you in a program like Excel, even small businesses without access to expensive business intelligence products can quickly get a real-time window into the performance of their marketing efforts. Takes some time, but it`s well worth it the first time you make a sound decision based on objective data.

grrlduda

That`s what I thought. You have all these reports - from your web site stats to your Search Engine stats and then have to really clump it together in Excel so you have it all in one place. RE: Forming good habits: As entrepreneurs do you look at your reports on a monthly basis. I think sometimes we either get obsessed with numbers or we get lazy with reviewing our stats because we`ve become so busy with other things on our to-do list.

ujeans

Here is a good site that I came across in a podcast (sorry SUNners it wasn`t yours - I`ll have to remember which one it was).  You place a bit of code on your pages and it will analyze the search hits that are referred to your site:http://www.hittail.com/

Chuck

No worries Daniel, we know we`re not the be all end all! If you`re looking for other cool analytical tools, take a look at crazyegg.com, they`ve got some affordable and powerful tools for testing and analytics as well.