Web Analytics in 5 StepsWeb analytics software can be daunting, giving you lots of figures and percentages. However, careful analysis of these figures will help you to draw conclusions about your marketing campaigns, so you can improve on them.

Here are 5 steps you can use to measure your success in your marketing campaigns, with the help of web analytics.

#1 Know your whole sales process

The first step is to know your sales process, of sales funnel, whatever you call it. You need to know what each customer or prospect is brought though once he lands on your site. Importantly, you need to know what products or services you are offering to your customers and how much each purchase will mean to you.

Lets take a example to explain this. Lets take it that you have planned your sales funnel like this:

  1. A visitor comes to your site and opts in to get your free ebook.
  2. Then you follow up with 7 email messages, one a day, promoting your membership site, which the visitor will pay you $50/month for.
  3. After that you will continue to upsell to your customers your face-to-face coaching program, which is $1000 for the whole package.

#2 Know what to measure

Measure your web metricsAfter you have mapped out your sales process, the next step to take is to identify the key elements to measure.

Along the sales process, these are essentially your customers decisions – conversion rates, continuing a monthly subscription etc.

Based on this scenario, the key metrics you need to measure are:

  1. What is the opt in rate for each visitor to your site?
  2. What is the conversion rate for your 7 emails promoting your membership site?
  3. How long do people stay on your membership site? How many months?
  4. What is the conversion rate for your upsell to coaching program?

#3. Put in those figures!

After you have identified these elements, you need to put in your current figures. Tracking your web analytics need to start from day one. There is no “good” rate of conversion because every market is different. The goal is just to keep improving!

Let’s put in some dummy figures. Lets say:

  1. You have a 5% opt in. That is, for every 100 visitors, you have 5 signups for your ebook. However, note that the “goal value” is $0, because you don’t sell anything at this point.
  2. Your 7 part email course converts at 10%. That means, out of 100 free ebook signups, you have 10 people signing up for your membership site.
  3. On average, each member stays on your membership program for 6 months (that is, on average, they pay you $50 x 6 = $300
  4. And you have a 2% conversion rate for your face-to-face coaching. That means, out of 100 visitors, you have 2 people getting to you for your coaching program.

#4 Work out the cost per visitor

Now you have all the figured filled in, you need to work out the cost per visitor. I find it easier to do this by using a large number. For example. If you start with 10 visitor and your conversion is 1%, you’ll end up having “0.1″ visitor converting. If you have long sales process, you’ll end up with little decimals which might get confusing.

Start with a number like 100,000 or 1,000,000.

Here is how you need to work this out for our scenario.

Lets say you drive 10,000 visitors to your site. Of that, you will have at 500 opt-ins (5%). From this 500 opt-ins, you will have 50 (10%) membership site signups. From the 50 signups, you only 1 will pay you for your coaching program.

So, for 10,000 visitors, you will make:

  1. 50 memberships x $300 = $15000
  2. 1 coaching x $1000 = $1000

A total of $16000!

Now you have it. 10000 visitors will give you $16000. Dividing this up, each visitor to your site is worth $1.60!

#5 Work within the budget, or do something about it!

Work within your budgetThis $1.60 thing is very important. Why? Because if you are spending more than $1.60 for each visitor, your business will collapse… sooner or later!

Its like getting a paycheck for $5000 a month and putting $5500 on your credit card bill every month. You might dig into your savings to fork out the extra $500 for some time, but someday you’ll go bankrupt! :mrgreen:

Of course, if you ARE already spending $1.60 per visitor, that is not the end of the world. Some things you might want to think about would be:

  1. How do I get more customers, spending the same budget?
  2. How to make more from each customer

Specifically, for our example, you might want to think and work on:

  1. How do I increase conversion for my free eBook?
  2. How do I increase conversion for my membership site?
  3. How do I increase conversion for my coaching program?
  4. How do I get people to stay longer in my membership site?
  5. Can I extend the sales funnel to sell more products?

There are so many things you can do. You could work on your sales copy, reposition your website elements, add a video, improve customer relations, add more products to your sales process, extend your email campaign to 10 messages instead of 7… and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

… and even with all these, it is yet to touch the “soft” side of analytics, about how prepared and targeted the visitors are.

This is the world of Internet marketing from the web analytics point of view. Interesting eh?

How else do you use your web analytics?