Posting on behalf of Sharad Nandwani
When we launched our new version of Office Live Small Business last month, we also updated our Reports tool. In a January post, I talked about using Reports to figure out who’s coming to your site, what they’re doing when they get there, and how they got there in the first place (from search engine ads or from partner referrals, for example).
Today, I want to tell you how Reports gives you better insight into how your marketing campaigns impact your site traffic. For starters, Reports now works with adManager and our new e-mail marketing and e-commerce services. So when you log in to your account and click Reports on the left side of your screen, you’ll get rich Web site traffic and marketing detail together in one central reporting experience.
Let’s look at how this can play out:
· Driving traffic to your Web site: You’ve got your Web site up and running and you decide you want to do some search advertising to attract more visitors. You activate adManager and get busy composing keyword ads to appear on popular search engines. That way you target potential customers who are already searching for the products or services you sell.
With Reports, you can get highly useful information on the keywords people are using on search engines to find your site – even the number of times people were referred by a particular keyword to your site. When you see which keywords are performing for you, and which ones aren’t, you can refine your search campaigns. You can also see which search engines are sending visitors your way, based on both adManager-initiated keywords and organic searches.
· Keeping visitors coming back: Maybe you notice that you’re getting a lot of new visitors to your Web site, but not many repeat visitors. So you decide to try e-mail marketing to help you stay top-of-mind with your existing customers. You activate E-mail Marketing beta and set up a campaign targeting customers and prospects who have given you permission to e-mail them.
Since you can now follow day-to-day trends in your Web site traffic, you can correlate spikes in repeat visitors to the delivery of your e-mail campaign. You can also experiment and track what days of the week offer better response rates and what type of marketing (special offers, e-mail newsletters, etc.) gets the best response.
· Improving sales: Let’s say you’ve activated Store Manager, our new e-commerce feature, to sell your jewelry online. Using Reports, you can get a bird’s-eye view of activity on your Web site and in your online store during a given time period. For example, you can see the number of times people visited your site, the number of pages they viewed, and the number of conversions. You also can monitor total sales and the ratio of sales to number of visits.
With Reports, it’s easy to compare related statistics and devise strategies to sell more jewelry. For example, you can look at site traffic and see your most popular pages and then optimize them with stronger “buy” messaging.
If you spend a little time in the Reports tool, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of detail that’s there waiting for you.
Sharad Nandwani