Are you spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on advertising with poor to mediocre results? Do you know how many people leave your landing page without visiting any other pages on your site? Why are certain products selling better than others?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you are missing out on one of the most important elements of your marketing campaign………………

Analytics!

Google Analytics is a powerful web statistics program that is free and easy to install. Here is a screen shot from one of the websites that I manage:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Analytics are my favorite part of a marketing campaign. This is where you find out what works, what doesn’t work, and what you need to fix in order to get it to work. Let me walk you through a typical scenario.

Lets say you are running a new Google Adwords campaign to collect leads for potential new clients of your services. You have designed three landing pages and you want to find out which landing page is more successful at converting visits into leads that you can follow-up on. The best approach to handle this is to set-up 3 identical new ads in adwords (if the ads are different they may negatively influence the outcome of your experiment) and point each ad to a different landing page. You then set up 3 goals in analytics that track each time a visitor fills out a form on a landing page. Google Analytics will track separately the number of conversions for each of the three landing pages. After a period of time, you will be able to decide which landing page is more effective and concentrate your ad dollars on that landing page.

For every marketing campaign you run, you should spend at least as much time on Analytics as you do creating your campaign….if not more. This is a topic I will continually revisit in more depth on this site as we discuss various ways to fine-tune your campaign.