Ways to Make Money Online | Learn To Make Money Blogging, Internet Marketing Blog – Mo Money Marketing.com

These days running a website takes more than just throwing up a website and making sales.  If you are going to be successful its important that you understand your websites visitors, customers , and sales,  Where they are coming from and how much your sales are actually costing you.

Im going to show you some internet marketing metrics that you need to collect and how to measure them

1. Conversions

Getting visitors is great, but the main purpose of your internet marketing campaign is to generate leads or sales.  If you don’t have some kind of tracking in place, the only way to track where sales are coming from is to set up a special coupon codes or links to see which sales copy is working and which isn’t.

A simple way to create a tracking link is to add a little bit of code to the end of it –

http://www.yourdomain.com/salespage1?

The best way to track your conversions is

set up a traffic reporting tool that includes conversion tracking. Google Analytics is my favorite (it’s free, but very powerful). Omniture is the Mercedes of the bunch. You can learn how to set up conversion or goal tracking on my blog, here, or from the tutorials each reporting system provider has on their sites. It’s not that hard, I promise. And, with this set-up, you’ll be able to track conversion sources (pay per click versus organic search versus e-mail, for example), which is important as you dig deeper (see below).

2.  Cost

What is the cost of your conversions?  Knowing how much each sale is really costing you can really tell you a lot about your business.

If you don’t have tracking software the easiest way to track your conversion costs is to take the amount your spending per day or month etc, and divide by the number of actual conversions. Then take the total amount earned for the same period and divide by the number of conversions

(Spent / Conversions = Cost per conversion)

Spent = $400

Conversions = 5

Total conversion cost = $80

(Amount Earned / Conversions = Amount Earned Per Conversion)

= $600 / 5

Break it down by product. Do the same calculations, but product-by-product. That means you have to have some idea what you spent to market each product or category, though. Can you do it?

The best: way to do this is to use your analytics tool, and have a look at the actual value, down to the click, of every dollar you spend. Google Analytics for example, will show you traffic from every source, which means I’ll be able to see the value of every click from every keyword. That makes this data is priceless.
3. Traffic
Once you’re measuring conversion, and cost per conversion, you want to focus on the quality of traffic you’re getting. To determine the quality of traffic we need to look at a combination of visits, return visits, page views per visit and the time spent on your site by the average visitor..

Most people go about analyzing there traffic in the wrong way   They measure unique visitors and page views per visitor. A unique visitor is any one person coming to your site in a given time period, any number of times. So, if I come to your site 22 times in one month, I’m still 1 unique visitor. More page views per unique visitor means you’re getting more page requests per visitor, which could be good if we can determine how long each visitor is staying on the site.

Without using analytics software, you could measure unique visitors, page views per visitor, and time on site. Just by adding in time on site will help you determine how your site is doing is page views drop

The best way to measure traffic is to measure unique visitors, page views per visitor, and time on site by the referring source. By doing this you’re now measuring the quality of traffic from each site or ad that generated visits.
4. Bounce Rate
Many website owners are concerned with how much traffic they are getting to their site, but just because you have visitors coming to your website doesn’t mean you are keeping them. The bounce rate is the number of people that land on one page of your site, then leave without visiting any other pages. Analytics software is really important so you can measure this metric.

Pull up your ‘content’ or ‘pages’ report and look at the Bounce Rate column.
5. Errors
You must track errors! If you don’t, how will you know when something goes wrong?

Years ago I used to just look at a monthly or weekly report of ’404′ errors (also known as a page not found). As well as 500 errors (which indicate something is not working). Your hosting provider likely has a report they can give you.

404 errors just let you know when someone searched for something that was not found, but 500 errors will let you know when something is broken.

Best: Track both 404 and 500 errors every day, or every hour. Here’s why: Let’s say a site another website has an inbound link to yours,  but the link they put in place is wrong. Now you’re receiving 404 error reports every hour and can address the problem. This way you are not losing all of that traffic

6. Keywords
Keep an eye on what keywords (search terms) your visitors use to find your website.  It will help you know which keywords you should target in your content as well as show you words you are ranking well for, but are not yet targeting.

7.  Onsite Search Terms
Tracking the phrases your visitors type into your onsite search tool can help you increase your conversion rates if you focus on the top 5-10%.   Again use of an analytics tool is necessary.

8. Bailout Rates
This is one that many large E-Commerce sites spend a lot of time analyzing to see where and why visitors stop before making a purchase.

If you have a shopping cart, you need to know where and when people decide to not make a purchase after filling up their shopping cart.  Is it the price, did they not find everything they were looking for, etc.

The only easy way to do this is through use of traffic reporting software. Depending on which software you are using (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc), you need to look for a report called ‘goal funnel reporting’ or ‘cart abandonment’.