Analytics: The Why and How for Your Advertising

So I have gotten a lot of calls and emails from advertisers this week on how we can help our advertisers with their analytics. Analytics, for those who don’t know, are systems designed to help a website owner make sense of the traffic that his site is receiving. The owner of the site can determine the cost per click, level of traffic over time, the cost per acquisition, and return on investment that his site is generating. He can examine his campaigns at a more detailed level to ascertain how effective his effort is. All of his effort can be examined and optimized by filtering his data through one of these systems so the webmaster can improve his traffic.

7Search, unfortunately, isn’t able to set these systems up for you. This is something that must be added on your end. These systems supply you with a HTML code that must be added to the code of your website in order to begin tracking. Access to your site in that regard should be well protected. However, we won’t leave you completely high and dry.

Here are some resources that you can refer to help you work your way through the workings of the tool. These do a great job of providing step by step instruction on creating custom reports, setting up tracking and other features.

Prosper202 Blog

Prosper202 is the hub for a collection of self hosted apps, which includes Tracking202. Their blog features instructions for their analytic tools, as well as industry-related articles, and reviews on the most helpful services on the net. Their blogs regularly contain easy-to-follow images that can show you how to use their tools, as well as video tutorials for your reference.

You also have access to text tutorials, scripts to allow you to split test landing pages, cloaking referrers, and the Get Satisfaction forum. This is a discussion board that fellow Prosper users can use to ask a question, share an idea, or report a problem. The information is there; you just need to access it.

Google Analytics Getting Started Guide

This is the site that will help you to get set up with Google Analytics. The site is really well organized, with sections for Signing up, Getting to Know Analytics, and Installing Analytics. There is even a section called “other resources,” which is tailored to your expertise or lack thereof for other questions you may have.

This also features a discussion board for users from users, organized by particular issues. Some of these include tracking and implementation, issues you may be having with your reports and data, and the Google Analytics Coffee Shop, where you can share your worries with other like-minded users. Go to Help Articles, as well. This is the central hub for all things Google and AdWords. Topics covered are tracking, reporting, goals, and featured articles by Analytics professionals.

If you have not been using systems like these to monitor your progress, you are doing yourself a disservice. How can you determine if you are making progress if you aren’t monitoring or establishing any benchmarks? Create goals for yourself and use analytics to monitor your progress. Analytics can help you monitor your progress as well as maintain it. Look into it today.