Key Tools for Monitoring Online Marketing Performance – Part 1

Working in translation, both in ‘real life’, interpreting at events and meetings and translating documents, as in the online sphere, we’ve come to know a lot about the importance of speaking yours customer’s language – or all of your potential customers’ languages. But we’ve also learned a lot about how to track performance of your site and there are two key tools we always go back to, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. In this three part series, we’ll look at the benefits of using Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics.

Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics may look large and confusing when you first dip into them, but if you know what you need to look for, they both become a lot easier to navigate and dig out the gems of knowledge you’ll need either to pat yourself on the back for your great success, or begin adapting and changing.

1. Get yourself set up

First, here’s a little video to explain to you what it does!

Webmaster Tools is pretty easy to sign up for, pop along to here and follow their simple instructions to register your website as yours. You will have to verify that the site is yours by copying and pasting some information given by them, into your own site, but they’ll offer examples of how. If it’s beyond your capabilities, not to worry. The company or person who built your website should be able to do this easily.

Google Analytics can be a little harder to set up, so ask your developer or web design company to set that up for you and pass the login details for both on to you. They can set it up using your own gmail address and password to connect it easily to your other accounts.

2. The Waiting Game

Both Webmaster Tools and Analytics will need some time to begin collecting data. Webmaster Tools will begin collecting information already available, such as keywords the tool sees as relevant to your site. While Analytics will need a bit more time to find out things like who is linking to your site and traffic levels. Analytics won’t collect traffic info from the past, only from the initial set up date of the Analytics account.

3. Crossover

You’ll see a lot of crossover information between these two platforms but there are items that are only available in one or the other, which is why it’s valuable to still use both. Also, there can be information that differs. I imagine that this is due to so much data being collected and averaged out and differing timeframes, that there will be some slight differences in calculations.

Check back in a fortnight for part two of the series, at this point you should even have some data available to you in your brand new monitoring tools.

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