Why Monitor My Online Presence Religiously?

Blog JAN11, Issue 1
Part 1 of 4

Figuring Out What's Really Driving Responses.
"Earth - Ground yourself in finding the true way" (Miyamoto Musashi)

How often do you actually check your rankings? Or your social network followers? Or trends on your hits and statistics? Or even keyword trends on your web SEO’d (if your website is SEO’d) pages? Truth is, most people may get some of those but not all. However knowing EXACTLY where you are is a vital step to knowing EXACTLY where you want to go and EXACTLY if your current efforts are working.


Like the brokers with stocks, so often businesses throw money down the drain in the name of investing in marketing using irrelevant or unnecessary keywords for PPC ads, media announcements and purchased ads in virtual and printed media. This is done without any sort of reference other than the feel if sales are up or down but never quite knowing what influenced them.


The key to growth though is to know and to know precisely every little detail. I, myself ran into this same scenario as I purchased myself a shiny new PPC ad, using keywords that I so proudly researched and I threw the dice. For weeks I would watch the impressions go up into the 10’s of thousands, peaking at 100’s of thousands. And for that month, I got business through my website. I was excited and ready to dump in more money to get more customers… but something nagged at me.


Just for kicks I pulled all my reports. I got my hits report from my web stats; I pulled my PPC stats, I got my analytics stats and my “just in case” 3rd party hit monitor to compare them all and I was surprised to find that PPC did nothing but drain my funds. Now don’t get me wrong – I am not POO POOing PPC at all, in fact I still use them to keep traffic steady “over time.” However, in comparing my notes my PPC ad went live and started showing up AFTER all the business came in. Meaning something else was driving it.


From there I checked my Twitter stats, my Facebook, Blogger – everything I could think of to find out what made this sudden flurry happen. I found nothing. So I then scoured the internet for other tracking software for rankings and immediately, from what I could tell it was just good, plain old fashioned web SEO. I had managed to get 5 relevant keyword top 10 positions on Bing and Yahoo! Ironically, all the tools I used to get there was on Google and my ratings there are not as good. But that’s another topic. Currently my rakings are climbing there as well. Web SEO, statistically still leads all other forms of advertising – hands down!


I now have a handful of tools to do all the work I need to get accurate readings on my internet marketing efforts. From software to automate my social networking announcement life, to monitoring software that records every single domain destination clicks I know to the minute what is affecting what. I even wrote code so that every email I get from a customer tells me not only what page they were on when they contacted me, but which of my urls it came from. Confirming this with my keyword stats & history, I now drive my website, it doesn’t drive me.


Miyamoto Musashi said, “Ground yourself in finding the true way.” If you look at this and understand the depth of it – although I am finding some success at the “true way” in this one small instance, I also must learn to “ground myself” or to make it part of my everyday functions to the point of purposeful habit to continue to do this, always checking myself and verifying everything.


Tedious? Sure. Worthwhile? Well, consider this – with enough page one rankings on relevant keywords, how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars would you save omitting PPC, printed ads, and your other marketing efforts per year? I am currently tracking that too.