Analytics Basics

Running your own business means that you probably wear many different “hats”  throughout the day including: sales manager, stock person, customer service rep, payroll provider, and many, many more.  One area that you may be able to hand over to the experts is analyzing visitor data from your website.  If you are just starting out and don’t have a lot of capital to sink into a consulting company for their analytics package, then Google Analytics might be the solution to help you you to collect and analyze information about everything from: how the user arrived at your website, what they did while on your website, whether or not they converted, as well as offering lots of additional information about the user themselves. Small Business owners need to be able to monitor and track the efficiency of an online campaign and get the best results for current marketing efforts. Let’s look at the advantages of Google Analytics for your business needs.

In the years before the dawn of the internet and E commerce, business owners had to rely on traditional advertising methods to entice customers and had no real way of knowing how a customer found their store, product or service.  Now with today’s technology, business owners can find out some pretty basic but valuable pieces of information about consumers such as:

• How visitors found your website – Did he/she use a search engine, via social media or an external link?
•  Was the visitor viewing your site for the first time or were they a return customer?
• How visitors moved through the site. For example,  did they stay a while and read? Did they click on different pages? Did they get bored and leave straight away?
• How they accessed the website in the first place (mobile phone, tablet, desktop)
• The success (or failure) of key conversion points on your site: i.e. the pages on your website such as ‘newsletter sign up’ or ‘contact form’ where potential customers can ‘convert’ to a lead by entering their details.
• For E commerce sites it can track sales, ROI, average order value etc.

These are just a few of the questions that the free Google Analytics metrics can share with your business leaders.  These valuable insights into your customers behaviors can take the guess work out of what has worked on your website and what has not.  This data can lead to confident business decisions on ways to improve your website and business practices.

To get started collecting data, install Google Analytics code on to your computer (or have your tech person do it.) Getting started on Google Analytics  will help you with the start up process.  Here is also a helpful glossary list of Analytics terms. 

Categorised in: Blog, Marketing, Small Business