Tracking is essential to your content marketing program

Are you tracking the results of your content marketing efforts? Do you know how many visitors are reaching your website through your blog, social media or other marketing efforts? It's essential to follow these analytics to know what is working, what you need to tweak and which marketing strategies need to be discontinued. When you set up a website for the first time, analytics may be one of the last things you bother to take care of or put in place. An excellent web designer will include this in their services, but it doesn't always happen. As the business owner, you need to follow up and be certain some type of analytics is in place. Visitor tracking, no matter what your business, is EXTREMELY important. However, it's often forgotten in the flood of excitement of finishing your site and launching it. You have worked hard on your site, your content, your design and your features. It's your baby and you want to let it fly. That's great.

So now, here you are 2 (or more) months later and your site is starting to take off. You are starting to generate a few dollars from your website. Great! Now it's time to improve the flow and usability and find out what your visitors are actually looking for. But wait. How do you find this out? You can first look into your hosts statistics, but in fairness, while they are great for checking referrers and traffic stats, they don't drill down to the nitty gritty. You realize now that you should have put something in place when you first started.

Enter Google Analytics. Google Analytics is an advanced and FREE visitor tracking service. Most of you have probably heard of it already. Google Analytics allows you to track your visitors and their behavior down to the most detailed level. Covering the features of Google Analytics is far beyond the scope of this post, but you can sign up and play around for yourself. Google Analytics is super easy to set up. All you need to do is post a few lines of JavaScript into your sites HTML. Once you have Google Analytics set up, the rest is taken care of by Google. You don't have to worry about a thing. Now, assuming you have taken my advice, you have two (or more) months of tracking information available to you. Are your visitors coming and searching for something on your site? If so, it should be made available on the main page. Why make them search? Are your visitors coming to your site looking for content that you do not actually have? You should create it. You get the idea - the li st goes on and on.

So there you have it. If you set up your analytics and tracking early on, it makes it ten times easier to improve your site, grow your business and start making more money earlier. I have used many different tracking services and it all boiled down to me using Google Analytics. Experiment a little and find out what works for you. I hope this post has given you enough reason to invest an additional five minutes setting up some sort of tracking for your website before you go "live". Your five minute investment can make the world of difference months down the line.

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