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 Today I have a great two-part marketing guest post by freelance writer Clare Evans.

Monitoring Marketing Success - 5 Things to Track on Google Analytics

By Clare Evans

You invest a great deal of time and money into online marketing. Everything from your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts can cost you both time and money. So you want to know that your hard work is paying off.

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is perhaps the most popular way to track your online success. With a comprehensive, user-friendly interface; the software certainly has that ‘all under one roof’ feel.

Whether you’ve had your website 5 minutes or 5 years, setting up an analytics account is the best way to monitor your marketing success. Tracking your conversions, visitors, and much more has never been easier or more important. Here are five things you should be tracking on Google Analytics:

1. Customer Engagement

Engaging with your customers is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Tracking this is made easy with the comprehensive features on Google Analytics. GA will track everything from your bounce rate and time on site statistics, through to comparing your site visits to the number of unique visitors.

This is important because you need to know how well your site is performing. If your bounce rate is above 50%, and your average pages visited is low, you know there’s something not quite right with your landing pages. It’s also useful to know how many returning visitors your site has, compared to the number of unique visits.

Armed with all this information, you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. For instance, you can work to get people to stay on your site longer, or give them an incentive to return. This means you can rework your SEO, PPC, and other marketing campaigns efficiently.

2. Goals

If you’re using GA to monitor your marketing, you should be setting up custom goals. What do you want to achieve with your website? Are you looking for people to visit a certain page? Stay on the site for a certain length of time? Sign up to your newsletter?

Whatever your goal, set up GA to monitor and track your success. For instance, say you want to see how many people have downloaded your eBook. Set up your goal to monitor the number of people that reach the ‘thank you’ page after downloading. Only these visitors will be able to access this page, so you’ll be able to track downloads.

This is the same for enquiry forms and newsletter sign ups. Once you know how successful your current site is, you can make the appropriate changes to improve your goals. You should always aim to improve both the user-experience and success of your website.

Stop by next Wednesday, August 8th, for Part Two of this article. It will have tips three to five, plus a bonus tip - you won't want to miss it. 

This guest post has been supplied by http://birdandcocreative.co.uk. The UK based graphic design agency can help you boost your online marking efforts with a new website, and some SEO tips.

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Turn Words into Traffic with experienced marketer Jim Edwards. Jim will show you his quick and easy techniques for pumping out high-quality, persuasive, and professional articles, along with getting great guest blogging spots. He even goes into PLRs, articles written by someone else that you can claim as your own.

Check it out for yourself by clicking on the LINK.

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Until next time,

Karen Cioffi

Multi-award Winning Author, Freelance/Ghostwriter, Editor, Marketer
Writer’s Digest Website of the Week, June 25, 2012
“This site from Karen Cioffi should stand as a model for other freelance writers.”
~ Brian A. Klems, Online Editor for Writer’s Digest

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SEO Marketing Tips to Help Get Links to Your Site

The most effective way to get links to your site is through content and SEO marketing.

Here are the four of the most popular SEO marketing content strategies to use:

1. Write keyword rich and quality blog posts and alert your social networks that there’s fresh content on your site. If it’s valuable content, readers will be motivated to share it with their networks, moving it to viral status.

2. Do guest blogging on quality and ‘relevant to your platform’ sites.

3. Post quality and polished content to article directories that other website and blogsite owners will find of value and can post to their sites for free.

When writing for article directories or even guest blogging, make your ‘author bio’ as compelling a possible. You want to get people to click on your link. Your ‘bio’ is just as important as your article content. The reader needs to know that by clicking on your link, she will be benefited with more valuable information.

As an example, Joe Smith could use the following as his author bio:

Joe Smith is a published author, ghostwriter, and freelance writer. Learn more about writing and marketing at www. joesmith.com

It’s not likely that people will really care about what Joe Smith does – what they want is to know what will be in it for them if they click on his link. It’s all about the WITFM (what’s in it for me).

So, a more effective author bio might be:

To learn more about writing and marketing and to pick up two free e-books on writing and marketing, go to joesmith.com and sign up for his free newsletter, A Writer’s World.

Do you see and understand the difference? Make the reader want to click on the link.

4. Create and publish informational videos to sites like YouTube. Video marketing is gaining momentum in being a ‘heavy hitter’ for creating visibility and website traffic.

Another 'SEO marketing tips' strategy to use to get traffic to your site is ‘link bait.’

With this strategy you submit well written and valuable articles to sites like Digg.com and even article directories like Associated Content and Ezine Articles. If the article is very informative or entertaining, or the ‘good’ form of controversial, it will get picked up by the site and put on its home page. Now you’re talking lots of visibility and traffic resulting in lots of links.

Most, if not all, of the 'SEO marketing tips' strategies discussed have the potential to make your information marketing content go viral; this generates more visibility and traffic to your website, increasing your links.

There is obviously much more involved in SEO marketing, but this is part of the basics.

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Related Articles:

How to Drive Traffic to a Website Using Expert Informational Content
Websites That Work: 7 Key Factors (Part 1)
SEO and Marketing: Basic Tips and Definitions
2 Comments on SEO Marketing Tips to Help Get Links to Your Site, last added: 11/30/2011