March 20, 2009 (reprinted with permission from John E. H. Cox, Director, Marketing and Technical Operations, SourceSolution) Monitoring your website
"Marketing in an economic downturn is extremely important. Just as important is careful monitoring of your efforts. As I have learned in discussions I have had with people over the years, many companies often cannot tell how potential clients are finding them and therefore what is effective and what is not. But you can be assured that potential clients will be looking for you online at some point and monitoring your online presence is essential.
Driving traffic to your website is extremely important, and often companies try to increase traffic by using email blasts, pay-per-click (PPC), and banner advertisements. However, while driving traffic to your site is helpful, it will not necessarily translate into increased conversions. The reason that traffic does not always translate to success is because websites are often difficult to navigate. A call-to-action, such as a web form, should be no more than 3 clicks away; otherwise the user may leave your site in frustration. Many sites are now using webtracking software to monitor hits and visits.
I have personally used Google Analytics and Webtrends to monitor website traffic. These packages are extremely powerful and offer a wide range of information. However, what you really want to pay attention to is your exit points, bounce rates, and navigation paths. Bounce rates are extremely important. For example, if you have a landing page for a PPC campaign that has a bounce rate of over 50%, this could mean that your PPC needs adjustment or visitors are simply not finding what they want on that page. Another example... if you have high exit rates on your homepage, this could mean people are confused about what you are offering.
Not too long ago I noticed on one of the sites I was managing that we had a high exit rate on our "contact us" page. This seemed strange because I could tell that people were, in fact, spending time looking around the site. What I discovered was this. If I simplified the "contact us" page by removing some of the required fields, the exit rate decreased and, in turn, we got more requests.
A great feature of Google Analytics is the Site Overlay function, which allows you see how visitors are traversing through your site. You can see where they are going most often, where they get stuck and what is working. Monitoring a site is not a once-a- month activity, though; you want to have someone looking at it on a daily basis. Test your pages, try different titles, different copy, and see what drives the most conversions."