One of the challenges of demonstrating the importance of search marketing to promotional products suppliers is getting a feel for the traffic on supplier web sites. The traditional thinking is that supplier sites are for distributor use and while distributors may “bring” an end user to a supplier site – end users are not the focus. Who can blame suppliers for thinking this way when their entire internet history to date has been focused solely on the distributor. Web sites have been built to be distributor friendly and for the most part are static brochures. So why should a supplier care about end user traffic? Because in many cases – it’s a big number!
Unless you’ve specifically blocked search engines from indexing your site (or your site design is not search engine friendly) every word of your site is stored in google and other seach engines. Evey word is searchable and when people search for terms that appear on your site – you probably show up.
TIP – There is Gold in your item numbers. Try this – do a google search on one of your most popular item numbers (SKU’s) or brands. Chances are your site will come up in the search results. If it doesn’t then you need to ask why not and see who is showing up. One of your competitors may be optimizing their site or bidding for ads based on your item numbers / brands.
So -would you like to know how many visitors your site gets, how they get there, how long they stay, which pages they visit, and what they do before leaving your site? You can get all this information and more using Googles free product – google analytics.
While this is not meant to be a comprehensive discussion of the capabilities of google analytics I do want to share with you some examples of its capabilities. At it’s most basic level GA will help you determine how many visitors you are getting, where they’re coming from and what they do when they arrive on your site. Once you have a feel for what your site visitors are doing when they arrive, you can begin to tweak your site to make it perform better.
Figure 1. – overall traffic statistics showing unique visitors for a 1 month period
Figure 2 – Sources of traffic and top keywords
As you can see from these screen shots – Google Anayltics provides a wealth of data. You can see how many unique visitors are coming to your site, how they’re getting there and what they did while visiting. The next obvious question is what do you want your visitors to do on your site and how can you get more of them to take that action? As a PromoLeads subscriber – you want your visitors to fill in a lead form and create an opportunity for you and your distributors – that’s what we call conversion. Getting higher conversion rates will be the topic of many blog posts to come.
Further Resources