First off, I’d like to say happy holidays! No matter what you celebrate, we here at Blue Shift Web Services wishes you a healthy, happy new year.
To get into our post for the day, we’re going to cover tracking your stats for your online presence. We suggest using Google Analytics to track website stats, and the built in analytics for each of the social media platforms. Each platform has “vanity” stats as well stats you should actually be tracking. Vanity stats are the ones that people tend to think are everything, such as followers or likes. They are the things that make you look good to others without helping your business. However, the stats you should be tracking are interactions. These will tell you what’s working with your visitors and potential buyers.
As a rule of thumb, you should be tracking engagement on social platforms and behavior on the website. We’ll dive a bit deeper into how to track metrics over time. This will allow you to expand and succeed with your marketing campaign, both on social media and on search engines.
Engagement
For the different social media platforms, you should be tracking how many people are interacting with your posts rather than how many liked your page. Having active followers is the most important thing on social media. You can encourage this by asking open ended questions for your followers to answer in the comment sections.
For blogs and website content, you can encourage them to share to social media platforms, like the posts, and leave comments. For products, encouraging shares and reviews are good ways to boost engagement.
Vanity Stats
Vanity statistics are those that at first glance that you might think are the most important. This includes things like followers and likes, registered users, downloads, and raw pageviews. This metrics are often meaningless and easily manipulated. You can buy followers (which is a very bad thing, and can get you in trouble with many platforms) to artificially enhance your vanity stats.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool to help you track different metrics on your website including acquisition, behavior, and audience. We’ll dive a bit deeper into each of these sections shortly. But first, to install Google Analytics, you’ll need to copy and paste a specific code into your website. Depending on how your website was made, there are different ways of installing it. For example, for websites built on HTML/PHP you’ll simply copy and paste the code provided in between the <head> and </head> tags. For WordPress, there’s a slew of plugins to help you install the tracking code.
Audience
The Audience tab has a lot of great information about who exactly is visiting your site. We suggest that you pay attention to the demographics of the age and gender so you can target your content better.
Behavior
The behavior tab is probably the most informative when it comes to how people are interacting with your site. You can track where visitors come in and out of your site, how long they stay, and what pages they viewed while visiting.
Acquisition
This tab is also important because it tells you where your visitors are finding you. Knowing this information allows you to expand your marketing campaign where it’s already working.
Hopefully this quick overview gives you some important insight on how to accurately track if your marketing campaign is working. Need a great marketing agency? Be sure to comment and share!
