Inspect What You Expect – Tracking Your Online Business Results

A wise man used to tell me over and over again. “Barry, you inspect what you expect.” While I must admit I did get tired of hearing it at times it has served me well in many areas of my life and marketing businesses online is no exception.

So what exactly does that pithy and sometimes annoying little saying mean? It means that when working on a project, that you have goals and expectations for, you need to constantly monitor its progress. Otherwise, you’ll never really know if and why what you’re doing is working or not working. Tracking results also makes it easier to ascertain what needs to be adjusted, corrected or changed entirely so that your expectations can be met.

Often times, by inspecting what I’m expecting, I discover that some of my assumptions and expectations are a little off or even downright unrealistic. While this can be disappointing it’s better to know these things as soon as possible and make the necessary changes rather than to continue on in ignorance. Plus, I always learn something from the process. In fact I usually learn more from my failures than successes.

Below is a short list of the tools I use to track all of my Internet marketing campaigns. Of course it varies slightly from project to project but these are the basics that when used will give you a good idea of how you’re doing and where you need to improve.

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Google Analytics – Traffic, Visitor Trends, Funnel Visualization, Site Overlay, Goal Tracking and More…

Several years ago Google purchased the top premium web stats company, Urchin Software. Shortly after making this purchase they launched Google Analytics. What used to cost individuals and web hosting companies, like the one I owned at the time, $1000’s of dollars per year to license soon became available for free. At first it was only by invitation but by 2006 anyone who wanted to could use this powerful web stats package.

Since that time it has gone through many changes and upgrades. The most recent happened only a few weeks before the time of this post.

GA, as it’s commonly referred to, is by far the easiest to use and learn from web stats package available. The data you can glean from GA is instrumental in running a successful online business.

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SEO Elite – Track Rankings and Backlinks

In addition to tracking web stats I like to monitor how my SEO, Article Marketing and Web 2.0 campaigns are doing in helping me to achieve higher rankings and backlinks. SEO Elite is the perfect tool to do this quickly and almost effortlessly. Plus, SEO Elite does much more. Running link building campaigns and competition research are just two of the additional features of SEO Elite.

It comes with a comprehensive set of training videos and is very user friendly. While this is not a free program the time it saves you and the information it provides is well worth the price.

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Google Adwords – Conversion Tracking

If you’re running Google AdWords campaigns for your landing / sales pages and you’re not tracking conversions then you might as well be taking that money and flushing it down the toilet every month. Honestly, this is a major violation of not inspecting what you’re expecting. The information that is available to you as a pay-per-click advertiser is unprecedented compared to any other form of advertising. (e.g. Print Ads, Radio, TV, etc…) Take advantage of it.

I’ll give you an example… One of my clients came to me after having no success at all in running AdWords campaigns to a sales page for some software they had developed. When I asked them what their conversion rate was they had no idea. They weren’t tracking conversions. I immediately setup conversion tracking on their sales pages and began testing different combination’s of keywords, ad headlines / copy and sales page headlines / copy. Since we were tracking the results we could immediately see what was working and what wasn’t. We made the necessary adjustments and now they enjoy an 8-11% conversion rate.

Six months ago they would have told you Pay-Per-Click is a waste of money and doesn’t work. And they’re right if you don’t track and adjust accordingly. Today however, they’re selling software over the Internet and making a decent profit doing so.

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MyBlogLog – Blog Stats

This service is well known to many bloggers for it’s social networking features. I also enjoy the easy to view and constantly updated stats it provides. If you have a blog you should use this service in addition to GA. Use it not only for the web stats but most importantly for the social networking aspects.

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Feed Burner – RSS Subscribers and Feed Promotion

Another must have for all bloggers or anyone else publishing an RSS feed. Hint: If you have a web site then you probably should be using RSS. Simply put FeedBurner allows you to track the number of people who read your feed, as well as, offers some really cool feed promotion and troubleshooting tools.

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Well there you have it. My most commonly used web tracking tools. If you’re not tracking your web marketing efforts I encourage you to start today. It’s not always the easiest thing to do but the difference it makes could very well be the difference between success and failure.

Good Luck, Barry O.