1. Establish Sales/Revenue Tracking
It is absolutely critical that you measure where traffic, sales, and revenue originate from because you can then use that knowledge to make smart decisions when it comes time to allocate your budget. At this point in the year, we are hoping you spent the requisite amount of time instituting effective tracking either by way of Google Analytics or whatever web analytics package you might be using. (click here for a refresher course on Google Analytics
Here are the specific areas of tracking you need to be concerned with:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Conversion Codes
- Goal Tracking
- Ecommerce Revenue Tracking
- Campaign Tracking
PPC Conversion codes are provided by the engines, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. Implementation is rather “tech-lite”—you don’t need programming knowledge to do this. Simply insert these codes on the order confirmation pages of your site so that they can be triggered when a sale occurs.
Goal Tracking simply refers to setting up Google Analytics to track the secondary metrics on the site. These would include newsletter signups, catalog requests, contact us forms submitted, etc. This implementation can actually occur within Google Analytics. No coding on your site is required. Similarly, other analytics packages (such as Omniture SiteCatalyst) have ways to track these metrics, although they may require some minor code adjustments on site.
Ecommerce Revenue Tracking is slightly more complicated to implement. It involves setting some variables that can be used to pass order data to the analytics program from your shopping cart. This is where you need your programmer or webmaster to step in. This step is especially important because you’ll want to know, at the end of a particular time period, where your revenue came from.
Campaign Tracking involves appending tracking codes to links you are promoting on other sites. These would include banner ads, text links, or other links that point back to your site. By appending these tracking codes, you can more accurately determine how much traffic and/or how many sales a particular referral source brought in to your site.
