By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Problem: you’ve created your website, blog and social media and have implemented search engine optimization, but you don’t know how to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI). Solution: Google Analytics. Yes, the answer really is that simple. Google Analytics is a free, easy to use tool offered by Google that allows you to filter your traffic to see the true impact of your efforts.

Once you’ve created an account, your Google Analytics report will show you graphs of your daily visits, average time on site, bounce rate, the geographical areas your visitors are from and more. Furthermore, Google Analytics recently launched social reporting which means you can now see the referrals to your website from social media, conversations on your social media sites, how your content is being shared socially and more. Both of these reports allow you to analyze your traffic to determine what your home buyers are actually looking at and looking for.

By becoming better educated about how home buyers are interacting with you on all of your online platforms, your company will be able to adjust or make changes to your plan to meet unforeseen needs and to continue to increase what is working. These tools essentially make you a smarter provider because you’ll know what your audience wants and how to get that to them.

For example, in 2008, we had a Florida home builder who needed to cut their marketing budget. And, even though they cut their budget by 85 percent over the next three years, traffic to their website tripled thanks to the information we gained from Google Analytics. Now that’s what we call a good ROI!

If you’re company wants to increase your ROI or if you’d like a walkthrough of what your Google Analytics report is trying to tell you, contact Marketing RELEVANCE.

Carol Flammer is managing partner of Marketing RELEVANCE, LLC, a Marketing, Communication, Interactive agency with offices in Atlanta and Chicago.