Part 6: Monitoring Guide

Monitoring your Web site

In this section you will make use of tools and techniques used in monitoring your website, Monitoring your traffic is crucial especially when assessing the progress of specific advertising campaign. In addition it allows you to monitor how your page's navigation is functioning as well as the page's popularity. Its all a constantly changing learning curve and in this industry you need to keep track in order to stay ahead in the game.

Getting the right monitoring tool for the job

There are various ways of monitoring your web site, most hosting providers have reporting tools included in the package. Many sites offer free tracking and monitoring information in exchange for a linking device to promote their own pages, however sign up for free with google adsence and you can receive the best statistic tracking services available from google included, this is great as you can view your stats and revenue earned all in the same place.

A good hit tracker will tell you the country of origin, the origin of referral . Which words or phrases were used on searches that were directed to your site, How the visitors navigate through the site and which pages are the most and least popular.

Submiting your site to check its google ranking for a rank check is offered as a free service on many sites however the free Google toolbar has a convinient Icon available that tells you the current ranking of the site your visiting automatically as well as option's for creating your own customised tool you can create for your own monitoring purposes, these customised tool's can also be shared as others to promote your site. This is not only great for monitoring your own site it can also be used to instantly assess other sites you may have an interest in linking to or purchasing.

Determine the estimated value of your web site, most automated systems rely quite heavily on statistics rather than content. Page optimiser has recently conducted a comparative experiment setting up two different web sites one full of content with a high page rank and good income structure the other with irrelevant and poor content and a limited earning potential, on the first site we spent no revenue on promotion and the page produced a healthy profit with the latter site we bombarded it with very poor quality cpm (popup's ect) as expected the site made no income. After submitting both sites to several automatic and live evaluations all the automated valuations favoured the latter site while the live valuation's fared slightly better. So as a rule of thumb, use these services as a gauge for your own information but never as a potential buyer, we will however keep our eye's open and will let you know as soon as something good comes along. This is a ongoing exercise and we will value your opinions and feedback in our blog.

Valuating a domain name is generally based on common sense how short is the domain name, is it memorable is it relevant to any high value key words and with dot com's generally having a higher value however its nice to put an actual current price value on the name, buying and parking (a system to generate income from domain name by redirecting them to relevant web sites) high valued domain names for later resale is quite a popular exercise.

Do a keyword search of your pages based on density and word placement, I would recommend that you carry out a key word search of your site as both a marketing and developing tool. You can the do a popular keyword search afterwards to gage the value of your keyword format.

Monitoring traffic statistics this can be done by google or usually by your web server provider. Many sites do offer you free stats however if you want a complete report (recommended) they will probably add a charge.

We have placed an example of a html format sitemap.

If you have hundreds of directory's you may want to make use of this Sitemap Generator.

Checking how many pages link to your web site using the google search bar. Just type "link:" followed by your website ie: "Link:www.pageoptimiser.com".

You can also use the google search toolbar to show all the listing's your site has on google just type "site:" followed by your website ie: "site:www.pageoptimiser.com"

Monitoring your Advertising

Keeping detailed historic records as to what has been done so you can analyze and tweak, etc. The trick with PPC is to always be refining and working to squeeze the best ROI out of your ads.You should always keep details of your ads including Keywords, Title, Body, Display URL and track important data such as CPC, Click-Through-Rate, Conversion, ROI. Depending upon how advanced your tracking is, you can also track Average position, Conversions by Time of Day, Conversions by Day of the week, Performance – Content vs. Search, Return Orders – Lifetime-Value.

Goal profit maximization: CPC (cost per Click) Versus PPC (paid per click) you will want to allocate your marketing budget according to the channels with the greatest ROI (Rate of Return or Return On Investment). Best practice is to determine the ROI for each of your channels and focus on those with the highest ROI. Then, allocate resources to other channels in descending order of performance.

Until you’ve tested a given channel you cannot foresee its performance, so you will need to reserve some of your marketing budget and attention to seeking out and testing new options.

In general, you will use a combination of your metrics tools (business and site), your product market knowledge and customer demographics to evaluate the improvement potential and select the variables with the greatest prospects.

Unless you are already the dominant market leader, and reached market saturation, then there is always potential for improving your business performance. By optimizing your Product Factors, then optimizing Presentation Factors and finally Channel Factors through active monitoring.

Optimizing your Product Factors by ensuring you have the best product value proposition, which is a factor of the value of the product (including supporting services, etc.) and the Offer.

Optimized the Presentation Factors by looking at your site statistics, navigation logs, etc. and determining where you are losing visitors in driving them through your conversion funnel to your site’s primary objective (i.e. a Sale, a Subscription, etc.).

Improve channel factors by driving as much traffic to your highest converting site at the lowest possible cost. Analyze the high cost non-converters to establish how much of the conversion problem is due to poor prospect targeting and how much is due to poorly-converting site pages. Ineffective keyword selection, poor ad copy could result in a large number of clicks from people who looking for something completely different from what you have to offer,in this case landing page selection will have no benefit.

An effective marketing campaign is based on return on investment and you will want to target the traffic first that has the greatest potential for benefit from the boost in conversion that you seek by landing page selection and creation, without an effective monitoring process this cannot be acheived.