If you have a website but you’re not using analytics to assess how it’s working, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity to gain insight into your visitors.
Understanding what your website visitors are doing can significantly help your small business website marketing efforts. One quick way to judge the impact of your marketing efforts is to see it’s impact on your website’s use. Web analytics tools measure activity and value for website visits. (Google Analytics, the most popular of these tools, is free, powerful, and magnificently simple to set up and use.)
By reviewing the data collected, you can see what pages are being used as well as how much and for how long, commonly used search terms that brought someone to your site, what sites visitors came from, how many pages visitors look at, and even what kind of device and browser they used when accessing the site.
This is helpful information because it shows how successful your site is at meeting your goals. Some typical issues and quick fixes include revising content on pages people quickly leave, fine-tuning your site to give your visitors a better experience.
Measuring against the past
In terms of actual campaign measuring, one of the most useful tools is the “compare statistics to another point in the past.” This tool allows you to take any time stretch and compare it to another stretch in the past – be it last week, last month or last year – or before a campaign, during a campaign and after a campaign. While there are any number of reasons to use the Google analytics tool, the easiest and most useful purpose is to show graphical proof of the impact of your efforts promoting and marketing your business.
How does this help me make money?
The smarter you are about what potential customers are looking for, the better you can use your website to make better connections. The better connections you make, the more inquiries you’ll have. The more inquiries you have, the more chances you’ll see to make more money. Each business and each campaign will have different goals and expectations, but having a tool that will help you measure against those expectations in real time is a crucial component to seeing the return on investment for your small business marketing efforts.
