Website Analytics - Does my business need them?

In this post I am going to make every small to medium sized business owner make better, smarter, and more imformed decisions about their business. I am going to do this by simply talking about website analytics.

There are tons of analytics software on the market but most companies  today are looking for the best bang for their buck. Google Analytics provides the most robust and powerful solution for a pretty decent price.  FREE! Why free you may ask? Google dominates the world of online advertising and collecting information. They can sell this “information” to large marketing companies for rediculous amounts of money. Don’t worry, you can keep your information about your business anonomous. Some companies may want Google to know what they are up to for the obvious reason of aquisition.

Some of the powerful features that I constantly pay attention to that have a great deal of influence on my business decisions are:

• Map Overlay - Wouldn’t you want to know where people are visiting your site from? Maybe your not hitting the areas you want to and need to launch a local marketing campaign. With analytics you would be able to see the campaign effects by seeing traffic from that area boost over time. (hopefully).
• Top Traffic Sources - Everyone needs to know how people get to their site. If you launch a social media campaign your going to need to know if your website is getting some click-throughs. You may also want to do an Adwords campaign to see if you can get some click-throughs via search engines. Search Engines are the most popular way for people to search for anything right now. Why not have your business there?
• Top Content - Every website has pages that are more important than others. With Google Analytics you can statistically see how many times people visit each page. This can tell you to change some things around if your most important pages and content are not visited very often.
• Goals - Important for every aspect of business and web metrics doesn’t break the mold. With Google Analytics you can easily create goals. For example, you can make a goal of a certain # of sign ups  this month. You can make changes to the website for a few months to see which one was most effective. These decisions make you more money so why not give them a shot?

There are tons of advanced features in Google Analytics that you can get into once you get a good grasp of where yor visitors are coming from, how long they are staying on your site, and how they are getting there. This allows you to make informed, smart business decisions on how you want to market your business on the web. People who blow their money on what everyone else is talking about can waste their money pretty fast. Either make informed decisions or hire someone who knows a lot about Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Website Usability, and maybe a bit of coding.

If any of this information ends up helping you in your business venture please come back and leave a comment. Many, many more online business advice to come!

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