How To Measure Your Success [Day 22: 30 DBWB]
[This post is an excerpt from the 30 Days To A Better Wedding Business Workbook]
In general, blogging is a low-cost, high return marketing tool but you still have to track your results to see what changes need to be made. All marketing is an ongoing experiment and if you don’t track the results you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t. Writing a blog post is not going to magically get you more business right away. Blogging is an investment and it will help you more and more as time goes on and it’s there forever. People getting married shop around, but if you show up in their inbox regularly they won’t be able to forget that they liked you enough to sign up for your email list.
What are you measuring?
What you choose to measure will depend on your your business. A blogger may choose to measure traffic because it impacts the amount of views advertisers are getting. A wedding service provider may choose to measure email subscribers in order to see how many people they are reaching on a regular basis. Those selling wedding products might choose to measure conversions (percentage of visitors that purchased something). In order to decide what to measure, think about what impacts your business most.
Tools to make measurement easier
Google Analytics
So if you haven’t noticed, I love Google Analytics and it is a must have for your website. It allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and what your visitors are doing-for free! I honestly don’t think marketing is worthwhile unless you can track it, and this is a great free tool to help with that.
Here are some great resources to help you get the most out of this tool:
Taking a Holistic Look at Blog Post Metrics
50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics
Liz Lockard’s Free Google Analytics Quickstart Course
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics focuses on giving you more of the “who and why” and gives more detail about your visitors. I have never personally used it, but I have heard great things about it.
There are countless tools to help you with tracking, but I would suggest getting started with either Google Analytics or KISSmetrics (or both) and see how you like them. Set aside time on a regular basis (at least once a month) to review your statistics and see what is working and what needs to be tweaked. This will help you do more of what people are coming to your site for, and less of what isn’t appealing to them. This will also teach you so many things about who your customers are and what they really value. So…get to tracking!
