Your website is a critical part of your overall marketing & advertising efforts. As we all know and hear a lot, it is imperative that we calculate the ROI of our websites to better meet the goals of our businesses, and so that we can simply measure our results. The reality is that for many reasons whether it is lack of time or we lack the how-to, most marketers don’t accurately track their online marketing ROI.

So where should you start? A good place to start is with Google Analytics and answering these three questions below to help ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing budget.

google analytics report

1. What’s driving traffic to your website?

You need to know what sources are bringing people to your website. Is it social media? Is it that Google Ad Words campaign you ran? Is another business linking to your site? You need to know what’s working well, so you can do more of it to generate more traffic, leads, and eventually more sales. Google Analytics is an excellent free tool to help you see what sources are bringing visitors to your site and it’s an easy to use tool for your small business with many customizable options.

2. What’s driving traffic away from your website?

Almost all websites have areas for improvement. Are people bouncing off your landing page? Is your website’s page speed slow? Has traffic gone down recently? If you aren’t taking the time to analyze what’s not working on your website, you could potentially be losing customers. Google Analytics can tell you where you exactly you lost your customer such as which page, how long they stayed on that page before bouncing off, so you can understand what to fix by understanding the behavior of your consumers.

3. What’s working and bringing in money for your business?

You’re investing in digital ad campaigns, influencer marketing & most likely more. It is crucial you track back to what’s giving you the most value for your money, so that you can plan & budget even better for your website. To measure your traditional marketing efforts, you can check Google Analytics to see if there was an increase in traffic during & after your non-digital campaign. Additionally, you can use unique coupon codes, 800 phone numbers, unique email addresses, unique URLS for your marketing campaigns to measure your efforts.

Please note that these 3 areas to measure your marketing efforts are just a beginning, but they will give you some important insight about your digital marketing efforts. Give it a try and if you have any questions, please feel free to email us here with any questions.