Internet Marketing Toronto – Post 4: Analytics Integration

Clive Lobo

Internet Marketing Toronto – Post 4: Analytics Integration

In our previous post we talked about all of the on page optimizations you need to do in order for your site to be recognized as being locally relevant to Toronto (or any geography you’re targeting). Today we’re talking about integrating analytics and knowing what information you need to review.

Google Analytics Integration

There are quite a few analytics packages out there, some are free while others are not. For the time being we prefer to recommend Google Analytics  purely for it’s balance between simplicity, ease of integration and features. There are more powerful platforms and simpler ones too – this one just strikes a nice balance.

Here are the basic steps for obtaining an analytics account and integrating it into your site:

  1. Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and sign up for a Google Account. If you have one already, skip this step.
  2. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and choose the SignUp Now button from the middle of the page.
  3. Once your signed up you need insert the Google Analytics tracking code into each page of your website above the </body> tag.
  4. Deploy your pages and you should see that Google Analytics has detected the code and data should start collecting – although you cannot see it until the next day.

Now that your analytics are being tracked you should do the following things:

  1.  Set your default page (the page that displays when enter just your domain name into the browser). Do this by clicking the Analytics Setting link in the top left corner, and then editing the settings for the section titled “Main Website Profile Information”. The default page is usually something like index.html, .htm, .php, .asp, or default.html, .htm, .asp, .php. This causes your Google Analytics to consolidate pageviews for your domain represented as “/” and your home page (default page).
  2. Setup a Goal to track conversions. Most of the time visitors to your site will contact you by filling out a contact form. If you don’t have one, set one up with a seperate thank you page. From your Analytics Settings page you can define a new “goal” by specifying the name of the thank you page and assigning a goal name. Now whenever anybody submits a contact form a goal will be recorded.
  3. From within your analytics account you should always keep an eye on the keywords that are bringing you traffic and monitoring your bounce rate for them. If it’s a relevant term but with a high bounce rate you may need to improve the quality of content on the page that is ranking for that term.
  4. Finally – you should have a look at the geographic locations where your drawing traffic from. Ideally if you’ve been doing your local search engine optimization properly you should start to see an increase in local traffic!

Up next: Post #5: Produce Local Based Content. Producing some local based content gives you the breadth of content needed to anchor your website in a specific geographic region. You don’t need tons of content – just some!

Clive Lobo

Spark’s resident boss man, Clive possesses the very nature of an entrepreneurial spirit.

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