Google Analytics is a superb website statistics tool for measuring overall website performance, your electronic marketing campaign initiatives, and in some cases even your website’s ROI. If you’re in the transportation business, and are using Google Analytics on your website, there are several key metrics within the service that will allow you to measure and assess how your site is performing.

There are two ways which you can view Google Analytics data, through the browser and via pre-defined and scheduled e-mail reports.  Although you can customize the type of reports you receive from Google Analytics, the most commonly received report is the default dashboard report which presents a good set of key website performance metrics. The dashboard report consists of several categories, which are defined by several key metrics.

We’ll take a look at each of these categories and metrics in detail, and I’ll show you how they should be interpreted within your transportation related site. Typically most dashboards reports cover the past month, so just keep that in mind if you’re viewing the PDF report.

Traffic Sources Overview – The Four Ways Visitors Get To Your Website

There are four key traffic sources for any website. Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines and Other.

Direct Traffic refers to visitors who type in your website address directly into their browser. These visitors either have your site bookmarked, know your website address, or reference some promotional material where your website address is printed, such as an ad, a business card or some other advertising piece.

Traffic from Referring Sites is the amount of traffic you receive from other sites that carry a link to your company. It could be a transportation partner, an association that you’re a member of, or a general internet directory.

Other Traffic comes from custom defined sources. You can track your various marketing campaigns (e-mail newsletters, outlook signatures, etc) using Google Analytics, but that’s beyond the scope of this article, and we’ll take a look at that in another one.

The Top Traffic Sources subcategory shows the source of where your website traffic is coming from. Here you will see search engines like Google, or Yahoo, or a list of those Referring Sites that we’ve talked about.

The Keywords subcategory will show you the top 5 keywords or keyword phrases that are used to get to your website through a search engine. In most cases it will be your company name, as a good percentage of visitors will type in your company name into Google when looking for you. If your website is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), phrases related to your business will show up here. So for example, if your site is search engine optimized for “Canada LTL”, or “Toronto Montreal Truckload” these terms will show in this category. Keep in mind, that on the dashboard report you only see the top 5 keywords, and you will have to login into the Google Analytics service in order to view more.

Visitors Overview  - What Kind Of Visitors, and How Are They Viewing Your Website

The visitors overview page, is the third page of your dashboard overview. The first metric that you will see is the Visits metric, which will tell you the amount of visits your website has received over a specified period. Any time someone visits your website, they are counted in this metric.

The Absolute Unique Visitor metric, is the amount of “unique” visitors your website has received. It is a bit more difficult to understand. A unique visitor is someone that is visiting your website for the very first time. If they have visited your website in the past within the specified time period, they are still only counted once. You can have  multiple visits, from one absolute unique visitor. This metric is a true representation on the number of actual individuals that have visited your website.

The Pageviews metric shows how many pages were viewed on your site. If your website has just a single page, and you had 100 visitors to your site, more than likely you will have received 100 pageviews. Simple math. So the pageviews metric factors in how many pages your website has. If you have a very large site, and a large number of visitors, the amount of pageviews that you will receive is very high.

The amount of Average Pageviews shows on average how many pages a visitor has looked when visiting your website. The higher the number, the better. A higher number typically indicates a higher quality of visit. In an ideal world, a visitor will land on your homepage, go to your services pages, and then visit the contact page. You’ve just landed a potential customer, and best of all, you can track this with Google Analytics.

The Time on Site metric shows the average number of minutes or seconds that the average visitor has spent on your site. Again, a higher number will usually indicate that the visitor is interested in your website and has spent a good time browsing around the various pages.

The Bounce Rate shows how many times a visitor has left immediately after visiting the first page that they’ve landed on. While this is an important metric, it is more important to look at the bounce rate when viewing the New Visits metric.  The reason behind this, is that the bounce rate on the dashboard report factors in New and Returning visitors. A Returning Visitor for example may just be visiting in order to trace a shipment, so the bounce rate for returning visitors will higher than new visitors. New visitors to your site will have a lower bounce rate. They will be interested in the services you offer, and will look around other pages of your website. The New Visitor/Bounce Rate report is not available within the default dashboard, and you will have to login or get a report setup in order to view these stats. Contact us on how you can do this (link to contact page).

The last metric shows the percentage of New Visitors. New visitors are people who are visiting your website for the first time. If you further dig down in this metric, you can figure out how your new visitors are reaching you – if they’re coming to your website directly or if they are searching for a specific keyword or term on Google and reaching you via a search engine.

Technical Profile – Browser and Connection Speed Data

The Technical profile section shows the technical aspect of the visit, such as browser and connection speed. This data is important to know if your website has some features which may be incompatible with a particular browser.

The connection speed shows what type of connection your visitor is using. In most urban centers DSL, Cable and other high speed connections will be most common. However, if your transportation company is primarily servicing a rural area where high speed connections are not prevalent, you will see a larger number of dial up connections. In this case, it is important to optimize your website so that it loads as quickly as possible for customers with slow connections.

Map Overlay – Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?

The map overlay is the last section of the report and shows you where your visitors are coming from. The PDF dashboard report will just show you the country of origin. You will want to login into your Google Analytics account and view the information in detail by clicking the specific country that you wish to gain information on. This will give you a further break down by region and city.

In Summary

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, and can be customized to an endless extent. If you have Google Analytics running on your site, that’s good news, because you’re already capturing all that key visitor data. If you don’t have Google Analytics, or simply wish to set more reports up to be e-mailed to you, contact us, and we’ll set you up.

There seems to be much debate on this particular question with no absolute answer. From the blogs and articles I’ve read, there is an ongoing ‘tug-of-war’ on the topic. Social media managers and/or firms are trying to pull more customers in (obviously) and businesses small and large are pushing back; unsure if social media is right for them. If in fact it is, are they comfortable letting a third party business control their image and online relationships?

Education is the most vital aspect of this endeavor and that cannot be stressed enough. A company venturing into social media must educate themselves appropriately so not to become overwhelmed and give up too hastily. There are no magic tricks to allow overnight success; it is a process.

On the other side of the coin, a business taking control of social media or majority thereof must have a comprehensive understanding of your company, your personality and your industry. Concise communication is essential to stay up to date and on course with your goals, while keeping your followers informed.

A plan must be put in place with a champion to manage it.  There are many ways to go about achieving this. Whether you simply want to hop on the bandwagon, gain more traffic and insight with analytics, or really get in touch with your existing and prospective clients, as long as it is done professionally, ethically and consistently… there is no downside.

5 Tips to Help You Get Started

1) Get Informed – Do some research and make sure you have a fair understanding of social media and what it takes to be successful with it. Look at other businesses in your industry to see what they are doing.

2) Create Achievable Goals – Talk amongst yourselves in the business to see why you are interested and what you expect to get out of it.

3) Devote Enough Time – After your research, you will come to the realization that this can be a full time job in itself. Make sure that either through your staff or through outsourcing, you have enough time to keep at it.

4) Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew – When starting, there is no need to dive in to all aspects of social media. Take it one step at a time if that is all the time you can spare. Start by creating a blog, facebook or Twitter account, then, once you are comfortable, select an additional platform and so on and so forth.

5) Don’t Give Up! – Once more, there are no tricks to ensure overnight success. Have faith; if you are posting interesting information regularly, there is no reason why your traffic shouldn’t continue to grow.

A helpful link on this topic follows,  http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26947.asp

Although nobody is jumping up and down with joy, we find the general mood in the transportation sector to be positive as we shuffle into 2011. There have been a few acquisitions, quite a bit of shuffling at the senior management level and the driver shortage topic has come to the forefront once again.

Does anybody know where this economy is going? Not really. But one thing is for sure… in the next few years marketing is going to play a bigger role in growing your business then ever before. We’ve seen it happen for us and our clients in the last half of 2010. Business opportunities are increasing through well developed websites that incorporate the latest SEO techniques. By developing a message that really cuts to the chase about who you are and what you do, more potential customers are finding you…instead of you having to pound the pavement to find them.

Today, you can accurately measure the results of your marketing through increased rankings on search engines. By benchmarking your current web activity through implementation of Google Analytics you can receive easy to understand reports that measure your progress and increased exposure through the web.

I would encourage you to look at what’s happening in the marketplace. Is the image presented by your competition making you look “old school” by comparison. Are you communicating a message that rings true with who you are today? Are your service strengths clear and pronounced?

For less than the price of a single trailer, you can create the foundation of a comprehensive marketing program. Whoever your vendor is in this area, set up a meeting and get the ball rolling. It takes 3-6 months to start seeing a return on this kind of investment. The sooner you sew the sooner you’ll reap!

Lee’s quote for the day

“At some point running an older truck down the road gets more expensive then buying a new one. The same thing goes with your marketing. At some point, not investing in proper marketing will cost you more than the marketing expense you’re trying to avoid.”