Set Goals and Drive Traffic to Your Website

• Downloading a whitepaper
• Signing up for an e-newsletter
• Requesting a quote
• Submitting information in return for something of value
• Viewing a product, service page or consuming some form of content (article, video, blog, etc.)

Every website should have macro-goals – things that help you generate sales or leads or prospects to which you can begin to market your products and services. Web 1.0 was all about having a website that provided information about your business – but those days are long gone and the landscape has become more competitive. Web 2.0 is all about interacting and marketing – making your business stand out, using the internet to sell, market and interact with your customers and prospects.

If you are not selling something online, what do you have of value to your prospects that they would give their information over to you in exchange? Whatever it is, that becomes a goal for you. Once a macro-goal(s) for your website is set, you can begin to use data captured through a web analytics package to refine your marketing plans and measure your success.

Setting Micro Goals and Measuring Progress

Macro-goals aren’t typically accomplished without achieving some smaller goals that will contribute to hitting that macro-goal. Let's take for example a company that sells auto parts online and advertises extensively via PPC search marketing. Their macro-goal is an online sale, but there are many steps a customer must go through to get there. Here’s what the typical customer might go through before buying a part, and some micro-goals that should be measured along the way:

A good web analytics package can easily track every one of these micro-goals, and if set up correctly can provide you a visual representation of how people on your website move through the buying process. The image below illustrates how customers who came to the site from PPC marketing navigated through the online buying process.