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E-MarketingStrategy : 4 Tips and Tools for Tracking Your Web-Marketing Effectiveness

Remember the old trope: You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

January 2012 By J.S. McDougall
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In the immortal words of Jim Morrison, "This is the end." This is the final installment of my six-part series of Book Business columns detailing the steps required to build a strong Web-marketing foundation. I'm going to end the series with four tips that will help you complete your Web-marketing puzzle: tracking your efforts.

One of the obvious advantages of Web marketing over the traditional kind (print, TV, radio, etc.) is that nearly everything anyone does online is trackable and measurable. Each post on Facebook, each tweet fired off at the end of the day, every newsletter sent, and even every inch scrolled down a Web page can be parsed, segmented and measured. Now, of course, this drives privacy advocates nuts—the price of secluded, off-the-grid cabins hidden deep in the woods has risen fast enough to keep pace with Facebook's share price. But, to marketers like you and me, this environment of constant surveillance makes it very easy to know whether the effort you're putting forth is indeed worth it.

The following four tips and tools will help you make informed decisions about whether Facebook is earning you more money than Twitter, or whether videos perform better than podcasts. Your Web-marketing strategies will (and should) evolve over time. But they shouldn't evolve without a strategy. The information you collect will help you craft that strategic path forward.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (Google.com/Analytics) will tell you more than you ever thought you'd want to know about your own website's traffic. If you are not currently tracking your site with Google Analytics, call your IT department and ask them to install it now. We'll wait here …

The first and largest piece of the tracking puzzle is making sure you know exactly what is going on with your own website. As I've said in earlier articles, your website is the hub of your Web-marketing strategy. All of your campaigns, social media profiles, newsletters and tweets should point people to it. Your website is the only place online over which you can exercise complete control of the user experience. It is your conversion point.

 

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FROM THE BOOKSTORE

<P>“Blanchard is demanding. He won’t allow you to flip through this book, nod your head, and leave. If you’re in, you’re going to have to invest to get your rewards.” <BR><STRONG>--Chris Brogan</STRONG>, president of Human Business Works <BR><BR>“Social media isn’t inexpensive; it’s different expensive. The human effort required to do it right is significant, and not knowing precisely how social media helps your business and how to gauge that progress is a dereliction of duty. In <EM>Social Media ROI</EM>, Blanchard provides the missing playbook for sensible, sustainable, profitable social communication. It’s about time.” <BR><STRONG>--Jay Baer</STRONG>, coauthor of <EM>The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social <BR></EM><BR>“<EM>Social Media ROI</EM> gets down to the heart of the matter: How will social communications positively impact my organizational goals? Olivier takes us through a journey starting from the start, creating a strategy to achieve objectives, and in turn, the means to measure return on investment. If you want to get serious about online communications, you can’t go wrong with <EM>Social Media ROI</EM>.” <BR><STRONG>--Geoff Livingston</STRONG>, author of <EM>Welcome to the Fifth Estate</EM> and <EM>Now Is Gone</EM> <BR><BR>“Olivier explains the intricacies of building a social media-influenced company for every layman to understand. It is important to understand reach, attention, and influence for social media ROI. This is the book to help with that understanding.” <BR><STRONG>--Kyle Lacy</STRONG>, principal at MindFrame (yourmindframe.com) and author of <EM>Branding Yourself <BR></EM><BR>“Ladies and gentlemen, the social media code has officially been cracked. In <EM>Social Media ROI</EM>, Blanchard reveals how companies can apply the massive power of social media to achieve equally massive results. Incredibly practical, yet supremely enjoyable, this book offers a clear roadmap to growing your revenue in the dizzying world of tweets and retweets, likes and shares, connections and comments.” <BR><STRONG>--Sally Hogshead</STRONG>, author of <EM>Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation</EM> <BR><BR>“If you know Olivier, you know he goes beyond the bullshit. He ‘gets it.’ This book will put you in the mindset to successfully plan and achieve real business objectives with social media. It’s a hard fact that good business decisions depend on real results. Olivier avoids the fluff with clear-cut ideas that will help you produce results.” <BR><STRONG>--Brandon Prebynski</STRONG>, social media strategist <BR><BR><STRONG>Use Social and Viral Technologies to Supercharge Your Customer Service! <BR></STRONG><BR>Use this book to bring true business discipline to your social media program and align with your organization’s goals. Top branding and marketing expert Olivier Blanchard brings together new best practices for strategy, planning, execution, measurement, analysis, and optimization. You will learn how to define the financial and nonfinancial business impacts you are aiming for--and achieve them. <EM>Social Media ROI</EM> delivers practical solutions for everything from structuring programs to attracting followers, defining metrics to managing crises. Whether you are in a startup or a global enterprise, this book will help you gain more value from every dime you invest in social media. </P> Social Media ROI

“Blanchard is demanding. He won’t allow you to flip through this book, nod your head, and leave. If you’re in, you’re going to have to invest to get your rewards.”
--Chris Brogan, president of Human Business Works

“Social media isn’t inexpensive; it’s different expensive. The human effort required to do


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A guide to prospecting, lead generation, building an Opt-in database, tracking, social media integration, deliverability, mining content and balanced creative. While email marketing has reached maturity, there’s still plenty of life in this channel — if used wisely.

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