Marketing data needs to be monitored on your WordPress site to ensure that you make informed business decisions.

Many business owners are happy to just see that they have a lot of traffic flowing to their website, but they do not realize that understanding why people are visiting and where they go is equally important for more effective strategies.

With simple tools, you will be able to find out who visited your site, where they are located, and what interests them about your site. You can even find out where they went after visiting your site. This article will give you crucial website marketing data to track on your WordPress site.

Analytics

Analytics data from Google analytics gives you a lot of insight into visits to your website. It provides information on visits to every page on your website. With this you can find out:

• Who visited your website
• How they ended up on the site
• The visitor’s location
• The time most visitors land on your page
• How many visitors you get everyday

There is a lot more you can keep track of using this tool. Analytics are important for every WordPress site and you should start using it from the first day your site goes live. Try to use Google Analytics to know your visitors and prospects the way you would know a friend, it doesn’t even hurt to know when they were born so that you can wish them a happy birthday as well as adjust the information you share with them according to their age.

You can even able to see the location of the visitors so you can know if people in your local area may be using social media more than they perform organic searches and so on. With that you can better target them as a local business. The data you receive from this tool can also help to put your mind at ease knowing whether you have real people clicking on your ads or you have competitors playing underhanded tricks by clicking on your ads to make you spend more on your campaign but gain less.

E-commerce Activity

For online stores, it is important to track the activity of shoppers on your site as well as the performance of different products. You need to know what shoppers are purchasing more, how much inventory you have, abandoned carts as well as checkout activity. You can track these on Google Analytics.

Setting up a good E-commerce activity tracking plugin may take time, but it is well worth it. You could try using Monsterinsights which is a lot easier to install. For people who may find Google analytics a bit complicated and elaborate, Monster Insights would be just right. It is able to collect the same data from Google and then present them in an easy to understand format and this will also save you time, since you do not have to be so smart to internalize data on Monster Insights.

Affiliate Links

If your site does affiliate marketing, then you will need to track those outbound links. You need to know how much traffic is being sent to the other sites whose links you share on your site. Tracking the traffic can help you negotiate for more advantageous partnerships with those other sites or even to get more businesses to partner with you.

Monsterinsights is suggested as the best plugin for this. It is easy to install and easy to use. Its report on outbound links is simple to understand and it appears right on your dashboard. You can easily identify which links are getting the most clicks. You can also be able to carry out an audit of your program and incase of any disputes, you would have the proof of how much business you have sent to the other site as an affiliate. It makes analysis easier and faster if you can see the data right there on your dashboard.

Custom Audience

Do not let a visit to your WordPress site be the last interaction with your audience. Facebook Custom Audience can enable you to make follow-ups on visits to your website. By installing the Facebook Pixel plugin on your site, you will be able to send targeted ads to people who have already visited your site.

You can categorize the audience, or choose to just send out to all the visitors to your site. Even if you are not advertising on Facebook, this plugin will do a similar job. The customized ads will continue to show in a targets feed for 180 days before they are removed. Twitter also has a similar plugin that you can use. If you wish you can adjust the settings on this tool so that you receive email reports on your insights instead of having to check on Facebook. This option will also make it easier to store these insights for future reference.

User Page Interaction

This involves observing what visitors to your site do and how it seems to affect them. you can, for example, see how long people stay on a particular page and what they click on. The data can also help you to figure out which page is leading to the most conversions or sells.

By tracking interactions you will be able to make decisions like which pages to promote more, which ones may need tweaking or even removal. Google analytics can help you track this. Conversions are what your site was built for so never ignore the statistics you get on conversions, whether they are positive statistics or not.

Keyword Search information

If you are trying to improve your SEO, then Keywords are very important and you need to constantly keep track of this data. This helps you not to be flying blind in your use of keywords.

Find out which keywords have the highest search score, which are the top drivers of traffic to your site, how your site ranks in relation to particular keywords and in which searches does your site show up in results.

You can choose to automate this activity which will download the searches every 90 days, or you can do it manually using Search Console API.

Paid Traffic

If you are paying for ads that direct traffic to your site like Google AdWords, then you need to constantly monitor how these are performing. Just like keywords, Adwords can be monitored to find out which ones are driving the most traffic to your site and which ones are probably a waste of money.

Google Analytics has a tool to help you get this information with a single click and you will be able to monitor your conversions from paid traffic.

Emails

Once again remember that a visit to your site should not be the last interaction with that audience. Keeping track of visitor emails will make sure of that. On your site, you can add a page that will capture emails so that you are able to make follow-ups. This can also help if you intend to have a newsletter. Visitors can be given the option to opt in or out to receive more information from your site.

MailChimp offers great insight into your email campaigns, you can use it to capture emails as well as to manage the entire email tracking process.

Inbound Links

The links that you put on other sites should also be tracked. These could be paid or free, but all of them need to be tracked to find out how well they are performing. Sometimes you may have an arrangement where you have swap links with another site and you need to know if you are not getting the short end of the stick.

Using Google Analytics you can see which links are bringing in traffic and which ones are not.

URL Tags

While you are tracking links, you also need to track URLs, this is more specific than just receiving a report that says traffic is coming from Facebook. With URL tags, you will know the particular page on facebook that is directing traffic to your site. You can even see if it is a text post or a picture post that is attracting more traffic to the WordPress site.

If you find trouble installing all the different plugins to help you track data on your site, Google Analytics should be the best option if you are to choose only one.

Email Campaigns

No marketer can afford to ignore the power of email in pushing their marketing goals. When you have a WordPress site, you will need to push your brand more and email is a great way to do that but you cannot just keep on sending countless emails to prospects without checking the results. Emails from your website need to be tracked to know if people are opening them, what actions they take after they open and is their hope that they will lead to conversion.

MailChimp is the go-to tool for monitoring email campaigns. With this you can even design beautiful emails with well optimized pictures and well placed information. Once you have sent out the emails, you can then track different data about it. You will know how many people opened the emails, whether they went ahead to click on links to your site, what time they opened the email and where they are located you can even receive feedback from the recipients and respond to them immediately.

Goals

The ultimate goal usually is to have as many conversions as possible, but this particular goal can only be achieved if you are able to track the other smaller goals that lead up to the conversions. For example you may want to have a certain number of clicks per day, or you would like to be able to keep the attention of visitors to your site for a particular period of time so that they can be convinced more to make a purchase, even getting more people to subscribe to your newsletter is a goal worth setting and tracking.

Once again, the most used tool, Google Analytics can help you track your goals. You are actually able to add goals to this tool and then go on to tick off every time you hit that goal, in the end you will be able to see how close you are to meeting your ultimate goal of a certain number of conversions over a specific period.

Content

Your website content is so much the blood of your website. It is the reason people visit the site and it can be the reason they make purchases. It is important that you get it right with your content but even as important that you keep on checking to see that the content is still relevant. If for example you have content recommending perfect new year gifts, this content may stop being relevant after new year celebrations.

Keywords give you insight into what may be relevant at the time. Keywords can guide you to come up with the right content to attract more people to your site. It is important that you run regular searches to see the ranking of different keywords so that you are not left behind and you are not using keywords that are no longer attracting many people to your WordPress site. There are a number of SEO tools you could use to ensure that you keep your content attractive to visitors and keep track of what kind of content is getting the most visits on the WordPress site.

In the end, do not underestimate the power of knowledge about your traffic. The more you know, the better you can target them and provide for the particular needs they may have. Also, if you are trying to make money, you should not depend on guesswork to figure out how close you are to achieving your goals, which is why you need to track with the best technology out there.