“What is Google Analytics?” “Why should I use Google Analytics?” “How can I make money from Google Analytics?” “Why would I PAY to use Google Analytics?”

Well… I’ll answer the last question first, Google Analytics is FREE!

Now to the first question; Google Analytics is a system that tracks and displays critical information of your websites performance. In short, it shows you who is using and viewing your website. It shows you where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, which page is most popular, and so much more.

Next question… If you have a website, then it makes sense to utilize Google Analytics to allow you to understand how well your website is working for you. You will see that if your homepage has a high bounce rate then your website is not engaging potential clients. Your marketing and advertising strategy may be driving the wrong type of customer to your site, or it may be time for a refreshed design or a clearer more impactful message. (Bounce Rate is an averaged percentage between the number of visitors who leave your site immediately and the number who stay and click through to multiple pages.)

“How can I make money from Google Analytics?” It’s not that you can make money from signing up but it will help you earn money. Most people reading this blog will be in B2B rather than B2C so ecommerce and tracking ROI from direct sales through your website is not relevant. However, there are ways to ensure your web presence is earning dollars. You can set goals; for non-ecommerce sites, goals would be what you want your website to accomplish whether it’s filling out a form, downloading a file, or emailing you. Values can be placed on certain goals if you need $ numbers to work with. Our IT guru Jerry wrote a previous blog article explaining Google Analytics in greater detail. http://www.trypm.com/blog/2011/05/27/google-analytics-interpreting-key-metrics-for-a-transportation-related-website/

10 Benefits of Google Analytics

1- Allows you to see how many people are visiting your website

2- Allows you to see how many returning vs. new visitors you are getting

3- Allows you to see where your visitors are coming from

4- Allows you to see how long visitors are on your site and how many pages they view

5- Allows you to see what the most popular page on your site is

6- Allows you to see how your visitors found your site

7- Allows you to see what the most common search terms are

8- Allows you to see a comparison to previous performance

9- Allows you to see which sites you are getting the most referrals from

10- Allows you to see how you stack up against other similar websites if you choose to submit yours

The other option is to market yourself through Google AdWords which I will explain in my next blog post. AdWords will take a bit of an investment but it, in combination with Google Analytics, will allow you to target your message more appropriately and spend your marketing dollars more effectively.

Why should you bother with social media? We came up with 41 reasons, taken from various sources, why you should integrate Social Media into your marketing efforts. Here’s our social media list, redux:

1. Over fifty percent of the world’s population is under 30-years-old.
2. All but 4% of them have joined a social network.
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the United States.
4. Social Media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the Web.
5. One out of eight couples married in the United States last year met via social media.
6. Years it takes to reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year.
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it. (Ok, maybe some of us do have a choice).
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India.
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China.
12. 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; Percentage of these using LinkedIn 95%.
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama, which are in the couple of million.
16. Half of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook … people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé, some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts.
18. Instead they are distributing electronic readers such as eReaders + iPads + Tablets.
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube, though its not really a real search engine.
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English.
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs, a majority of them are inactive, but this is NOT one of them.
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth.
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour, which is a lot more than I make.
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top twenty largest brands are links to user-generated content.
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? Do you even know what they’re saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
30. 78% of consumers trust recommendations given to them by their peers. 22%, don’t.
31. Only 14% trust advertisements.
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
33. 90% of people that can TiVo to skip through advertisments, do.
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas, but they didn’t outsell Chocolate Easter eggs on Easter.
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily, two of which came today from our two blog posts.
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us, via RSS and other formats that is.
38. We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second.
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in five years, unless you’re a really bad businessman.