Welcome to Day 9 of the Internet Marketing Makeover (#31DIMM for short)!
Your metrics are the core of your business. Knowing how well your site is performing in a variety of ways will help you improve it’s performance. Without this knowledge, any changes you make are simply stabs in the dark that may or may not pay off – and the fact is, you’ll never know without monitoring your metrics.
Most of the competition won’t bother – they throw a site up, create content, build links. That’s pretty much the standard operating procedure.
But the intelligence you will gain when monitoring your metrics, when acted on, can catapult you ahead of the other guys. It’ll leave them wondering how you’re “cheating” – but the fact is, you’re not. You just took the time to check your numbers and implement that information.
DAY 09 OBJECTIVE
Put in place monitoring tools to analyze your sites’ performance over time.
DAY 09 ASSIGNMENT
There are a number of ways one can monitor site performance, in today’s Internet Marketing Makeover assignment we’ll implement the most common and important ones. Later in the Makeover, after these tools have had time to gather data, I will show you exactly how to analyze and act on the data the tools provide you!
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is IMPERATIVE (that’s why it was a column in our initial Inventory Spreadsheet). The data Analytics provides is unsurpassed.
Install Google Analytics on all pages of all your sites. It’s a copy and paste action that’ll take you maximum of 5 minutes.
Wordpress users can use the Google Analyticator plugin to install the code. Alternatively, just paste the code in your sites header or footer files.
We will be looking at Google Analytics specific data later during the Makeover, so while your web host may provide you with a built in stats package (like AWStats) you MUST use Google Analytics also.
Sometimes when I first put a site up I overlook installing Analytics because I’m futzing around with designs and content, if you’re like me, today is the day to add it to any of your sites that aren’t already reporting.
LINK ANALYTICS TO ADSENSE
Once you have Analytics installed, you can actually link your Analytics account with your Google Adsense account and get deeper data on your Adsense performance.
If you are monetizing any of your sites with Adsense, you will love, love, love the data you get as part of this integration.
“How to” manage this integration depends on your current Analytics and Adsense configurations, I’ll refer you to the official Google instructions page for details.
SEARCH ENGINE SITEMAPS
Having a search engine sitemap won’t boost your search engine rankings (beware anyone who tells you it will!) but it can help newer sites, or newer posts on older sites that aren’t crawled regularly get indexed in the search engines.
Wordpress uses can install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for their blogs (currently the #1 plugin!). This plugin will not only build and install the sitemap for you automatically, it’ll also notify the search engines of it’s existence.
Folks on other platforms can use the free tool at XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap. Download the sitemap.xml.gz file XML Sitemaps provides you, upload it to your server and then use Sitemap Writer’s “Submit Sitemap” tool to notify Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com about your shiny new sitemap.
WEBMASTER TOOLS
Finally, create an account (if you don’t have one already) at Google Webmaster Tools.
Click “Add A Site” and go through the verification process. Once that’s done, you’ll be brought to the “Dashboard” screen for your site, click “Submit a Sitemap.” Add your sitemap.xml.gz URL (if you’re using the Wordpress plugin, there’s a link at the top of the plugin configuration page to this URL).
Google Webmaster tools may initially not provide you with much data about your site – that’s ok, it will update and provide you with lots of fascinating data over time.
We’ll come back to all of these tools in a later Internet Marketing Makeover post and analyze them till the cows come home!
ABOUT THE 31 DAY INTERNET MARKETING MAKEOVER
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{ 6 comments }
Hi Michelle,
Thanks again for yet another interesting article. I was wondering why so many Internet marketers say Not to use Google analytics on your site, suggesting you are setting yourself up for the infamous slap, but you do? Is there another analytics tool you would suggest that might be better; e.g. StatsJunky?
@Stew – No analytics tool is better – at least in the free realm. If you’re running 500 spam sites, then yeah, using Analytics would tie them together and probably not be a good idea. But I’m sure you’re not doing that.
All the pure white-hat marketers I know recommend Google Analytics as the best free analytics tool. Not to imply that those who recommend against it are black-hat, maybe they’re just a little paranoid and don’t want *anyone* seeing their data. (Sometimes a little paranoia can be a good thing, though.)
Michelle
For a blog, is it necessary to add Google Analytics to every page on your blog ie each time you write a new post?
Thanks
Ingrid
Hi Ingrid,
I think if you use the WP plugin that Michelle suggests above, you will find that it automatically installs Google Analytics on every page of your blog.
I use GA on my regular websites and by installing the code as one of global scripts in my footer files, it automatically tracks every page on my site.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the feedback Michelle. Absolutely yes, I’m not running spam sites. I guess my real concern grew out of how powerful Google has become and what that means in the marketplace. Apparently there is no recourse if Google bans you; even if they made a mistake. At least that is what plenty of the goo-rue types write.
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