Destination Website Metrics: The Big Picture

The Web Marketing Dashboard’s main page brings together the best of Google’s Analytics data with the data your website collects to give you a much more robust view of your marketing efforts.

You can view big picture statistics (such as visits, pages per visit and bounce rates) and watch how they trend over time, and drill down to more detailed metrics for greater insights. And by overlaying the your website’s tracking data, you can gain a better understanding of where your traffic-driving efforts are paying off.

Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities.

Google Analytics reports

Google provides a number of Analytics reports that are a must for the Web Marketing Dashboard:

• visits by location maps
• most-viewed pages
• referring sites, and
• search phrases

Alone, these tools tell you a lot.

But when you combine the referring sites and search phrases reports with your website’s data, you can see which sources and keywords are resulting in actual conversions. Imagine how you might change your internet marketing plan if you were to find that the sources and keywords that drive the most traffic (and hence, where you have focused the most resources) result in the lowest rate of conversion.

In our case, this is exactly what we discovered.

Our pay per click campaign was driving a ton of traffic to our website, however it was inflating our bounce rate by 150% and wasn’t even in the top twenty performing conversion sources. We were able to test a number of alternative scenarios and determine that ppc was not a good investment for Wanderlust at this time.