THE Definitive Guide to Tracking an Internet Business [Part 2]

Last week I discussed the importance of tracking an Internet business.

Let’s recap what we covered:

• The importance of tracking to the growth of an Internet business

• Why you need to review your metrics every month

• 5 tools I use for tracking

• Four metrics you should track

Today’s post is a continuation of the last article.  Specifically we’ll review additional metrics you can track with an Internet business:

#5: Video Marketing Stats

YouTube provides excellent in-depth analysis of posted videos.  You can use their tools to discover how people find your content.  This information can be accessed by selecting the Insight button:

With Insight, you get a lot of hard data about video content.  It tells you things like:

• Where people watch your videos (country of origin)
• What keywords people use to find the content
• The related videos that send traffic
• What external pages are embedding your video

This information shows what actions produce video results.  My advice is to select a few videos that compete for your target keyword phrase.  Study them to see how you can duplicate their success.

How to Get Started: Play around with the Insight interface.  Find competing videos that send you traffic.  See if they have other videos that you can leverage.  Done correctly, you can literally piggyback on the success of other YouTube channels by creating similar content.

#6: Different Sources of Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of your Internet business.  Unfortunately, it’s too easy to get caught in the trap of trying to do too much.  The secret to traffic success is focus.  It’s better to concentrate on one or two techniques than to worry about dozens of different things.

So how do you know what’s working?  It’s simple.  Create a distinct tracking link for each source of traffic.  That way you know if a technique produces results or if it’s a waste of time.

How to Get Started: Use a program like Adminder to create a tracking link for each traffic source.  This tool monitors traffic and shows the conversion rates for a lead magnet.  Not all traffic is created equally.  This metric shows what actions generate email subscribers.

#7: Opt-In Sources

This technique piggybacks on what I just discussed.  It’s important to track where you get subscribers.  Here’s how you can break down this metric:

• Subscribers from your blog
• Subscribers from article marketing
• Subscribers from YouTube channels
• Subscribers from PPC advertising

It’s impossible to determine this metric without tracking each traffic source.  With Aweber you can tag each subscriber.  This is a small tracking id that identifies the source of traffic:

Tagging a subscriber is a great way to figure out which traffic source produces motivated subscribers.  These are the people who open your emails and click on links.    For instance, you can cross reference who opens an email with the ad tracking id.  Within a few seconds, you’ll identify the traffic sources that convert.

Here’s another reason why this metric is important.  It segments your list and directs people to different types of content you’ve created.

Let’s say you have a list of subscribers from a blog and subscribers from a YouTube channel.  You can let the blog readers know about a video you’ve just created.  Then you can send an email to all video subscribers about a new blog post.  This is a great way to build your brand without sending too many emails to an individual subscriber.

How to Get Started: This is a three-step process:

1)      Create a distinct squeeze page for each traffic source

2)      Insert an ad tracking code on each page

3)      Use Adminder to direct traffic to the individual squeeze pages

After this, you’ll have a list that’s full of “tagged” subscribers.  This makes it’s easy to segment a list and send them targeted content.

#8: Pay-Per-Click Traffic

Pay-per-click traffic is an exact science.  You need to track a lot of metrics with this technique:

• What position an ad is listed
• What keywords are being used
• What is the click-thru ratio (CTR) for each ad
• How much money is being spent
• How much money is being earned
• What keywords convert best

The secret to PPC success is to know what converts a searcher into a subscriber and what converts a subscriber into a buyer.  That’s why it’s important to use tracking with this traffic technique.

I don’t claim to an Adwords expert.  But I do know that some marketers use it as the foundation of their Internet business.  Without fail, the successful ones are tracking fanatics.

How to Get Started: My advice is to understand every metric on the Google Adwords program.  They offer a number of built-in tools that track every aspect of a PPC campaign.  Tag each subscriber (see #7) in Aweber and you’ll know which ads produce income.

Also, I recommend trimming the fat from your PPC campaigns.  Get rid of the keywords that don’t convert.  Eliminate the ads that have low CTR.  And stop bidding on the phrases that fail to convert subscribers into buyers.

#9:  Entry Keywords

Google Analytics is one of the best tracking tools I’ve ever encountered.  I could easily dedicate a series of posts to everything it can do.  For now, let’s focus on one aspect – The Entry Keyword feature.

This tool tells you which keyword phrases generate traffic to a particular page.  This helps you customize content to what people want.  My advice is to re-optimize each page that gets a significant level of traffic.

Your goal is to move this page up the search engine listings and get it to rank well for a high-traffic keyword:

How to Get Started: Look at the top 10 to 20 pages in Google Analytics.  Identify the pages that get a high level of traffic.  Then click on the individual article.  You’ll see it lists the keyword phrases that generate traffic.

Simply rewrite this article using these keywords.  Then create a few backlinks to this page, using this keyword in the the anchor tag.  This is an excellent way to get more traffic with the same amount of content.

#10:  Blog Comments

Why should you track blog comments?  This metric identifies the content that gets the best response from readers.  You can use this information to identify patterns.  All you have to do write content that gets a high response rate and you’ll build up blog readership.

The number of blog comments really isn’t an indicator of success.  It’s just another metric that tracks the growth of your site.  My advice is to monitor the number of blog comments.  But don’t become obsessed over this number.

How to Get Started: A few weeks back, I talked about creating an Excel tab for a publishing schedule.  This includes information like:  Post title, date published, URL and notes.

What I suggest is to add a new column – The number of comments.  (You can also add another one that tracks the number of Re-Tweets.)

Over a few months, you’ll detect a pattern with blog content.   Are the comments going up or going down?  Obviously your goal is to increase this number and get a higher level of readership.

But Wait…There’s More!

There is a lot more you can track with an Internet business.  But that will have to wait till next week.

You now have ten different metrics that should be monitored.  My advice is to pick the actions that grow your Internet business and track them.  Use the tools I’ve listed and discover how to track your way to success.

Take Action. Get Results.