When you’re using social media to direct people to your website, of course you want to track your results. If you don’t monitor the results of your marketing, you won’t know if it’s working or if you need to change something you’re doing to get better results.

By yourself, or working together with your virtual assistant, you can set up a system to monitor your visitors and their activity once they get to your site. Everyone should watch their website statistics on a weekly or monthly basis to monitor trends and look for improvements.

Here is a plan of action you can follow using some free Google tools:

Step 1 – Google Analytics

1. Set up an account for yourself at Google.com.
2. Access Google Analytics and add your main website and blog url’s to the reports area.
3. Add the Google Analytics code to your website and blog, which will allow Google to start accumulating stats for your sites.

Step 2 – Set up your tracking sheet. (Use Google Documents if you’re working with an assistant.)

1. Start a Google spreadsheet to share the data between you and your assistant.
2. Set up statistics to track on a monthly basis:

Absolute Unique Visitors – how many first time visits to the site

Return Visits – of those first time visits, how many returned

Average Time Spent on Site – what is the average time viewers spent on the site

Bounce Rate – the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page

Country – if you’re growing your business internationally you’ll want to monitor your visitors’ country of origin

City – this lets you dig a little deeper to uncover what city produces the most visitors

3.  Add a 2^nd tab to the document titled Traffic Sources to collect info about:

Traffic Sources – What are the top 10 – 15 sites that directed traffic to your website

Unique Visitors – how many unique visitors came from these traffic sources

4.  Add a 3^rd tab called Keywords.

Keyword Research – How many visits resulted based on specific key word searches

5.  Set up 2 or 3 goals to judge conversion rates. (See examples below)

Goal 1: How many visitors signed up for the free report?

Goal 2: How many visitors purchased a product?

Collecting this information on a monthly basis will help you make more solid decisions on your marketing plans. For example, you may need to add more defined keywords in your blog posts, or you may want to focus on a particular state/region if you’ve had a large number of searches from that area.

You or your assistant should monitor and report on the stats on a monthly basis. This will allow you to adjust your marketing efforts based on the traffic and activity you are seeing on your website.

Whether you use Google or some other form of analytics system, make sure you are not just using it but also analyzing the data to make sure your marketing efforts are producing the results you need them to.