Are You Mining Your Gold?	Visited: 1499 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Nancy Talley July 29, 2003

"Do you know who your customers are?"

"Do you know how they found you?"

The marketing mantras are all the same.

1. To be successful you have to know your customers.

2. You have to know your market.

3. You have to know your competition.

"But what does it mean to know your customers?"

A new business may overlook a key piece of information in building traffic and getting the most out of its marketing plan - where do your customers come from?

Knowing how your visitors entered your site, what links they followed to find you, and what keywords were searched to find you helps you to plan for the future.

Your marketing strategy needs to be refined constantly with information you get from your server logs and other web metrics.

Incorporate what you learn about where your customers are coming from to find possible affiliates for your site and to plan the most
effective promotion.

You also need to track, target and test your advertising plan by finding which ads generate the most traffic.

Then analyze the traffic from each ad to determine whether it is generating sales. This will help you to target your advertising budget to the ads that bring you the best customers.

Use your web logs to find out how visitors are entering your site and what they are doing when they get there.

Ask yourself the following questions:

"Did the visitor click a link in an ezine article, a link on another website, or a banner ad to land on your site, or did a search engine to find you?"

"What websites and search engines give you the most traffic?"

The answers to these questions will tell you whether you should look at your search engine ranking.

To have an effective website you also need to know:

1. Where your customers are going on your site,

2. What your conversion rate is, and

3. Where the bottlenecks are that cause potential customers to abandon you.

Once you have this information you can take it and feed it back
into your plan, your site design, and your advertising.

Once you've collected information on what your customers are looking at, you can turn your attention to your marketing and advertising. To determine if your plans are effective,
you have to track results, and use that knowledge to fine-tune your efforts, concentrating on the advertising and promotion that yields the best results.

Before you can measure, however, you must decide how to measure success. Are you looking for a sale, a subscription to your newsletter, or some other action?

Once you've decided what to measure, look in your server logs to determine the path that leads to that action.

Knowing where your visitors come from will help you determine where you should go to bring customers to your site in the future.

So now ask yourself this question, "Are You Mining Your Gold?