After the big warm welcome I have now been part of the team here at 360innovate for a whole month and feeling the pressure to release my debut blog post so here goes!
I’ve been noticing recently that many SME’s are not utilising any form of tracking or analytics on their websites. This is a shame really as used correctly, analytics can be a powerful marketing tool. Google Analytics is a good starting point in entering the world of tracking your business online and is free to implement.
Why Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics has the power to give you a wealth of information relating to your site and it’s visitors without paying through the nose. This includes numbers, what people have searched for, where they have come from and what pages they look at. All of this adds up to a massive amount of data which can be used to further promote and optimise your site through online marketing campaigns.
SEO Companies such as ourselves take pride in the fact that our work is 100% transparent meaning that you as a client can see exactly what value we bring to the table and the effect it has in helping you grow your business.
This appeals to our ego’s and so we strive even harder to get results. See, it’s win win for you!
So, now you understand why you should be using analytics. Lets find out how to maximise it’s potential. Here’s some top tips to get you started:
Know what your looking for
As mentioned, analytics can produce a lot of data, much of which is interesting but not always conducive to helping you achieve your goals. This can cause a grave feeling of “death by data”
Instead, think about the information you need and then go looking specifically for it. This way, your not spending hours mining through data and come out with solid information you can then act upon.
So what should SME’s be looking for?
- Visitor Numbers
Why: Visits are the bread and butter of most websites, more visits generally means more revenue whether through sales, leads, ad revenue etc..
How: Don’t look at these numbers on a day-to-day basis, you’ll find it’s a great method of procrastination but yeilds little meaning. Instead focus on trending on a weekly or monthly basis. This will help you identify seasonality trends etc.
Action: Let some data build up before taking any action at all, this will give you a feel for what is normal for your site. If then you find that your traffic is decreasing, you know you need to dig deeper into your data to find the cause.
- Where are visitors coming from?
Why: Google is greatly important and depending upon your sector is likely to account for anywhere between 50-90% of your total traffic. However, it is also important to keep an eye on other sources of traffic such as referring sites, Affiliates, and social media. This will give you a good idea about which of your online marketing campaigns are working and the reasons
How: Google Analytics “Traffic Sources Overview” by default gives a breakdown of “search engines”, “Referring sites” and “Direct Traffic”
Action: you can use this information to decide on which campaigns to concentrate your efforts on, For example, if you find that social bookmarking sites such as “StumbleUpon send lots of traffic your way then it’s a pretty good indication that your content has it the mark for that audience and you may want to develop more content for submission to bookmarking sites.
Also, I mentioned earlier that an SME might see as much as 90% of their business come from Google, if in reality your site falls below the 30-40% figure then it may highlight potential craling issues. In this instance, you would know to spend time trying to fix those issues and gain your fair share of that free traffic from Google’s natural listings!
- What are visitors searching for?
Why: Knowing what visitors are searching for is important in figuring out if your SEO campaign is working effectively or not. Many SEO companies will guarentee results on numerous search terms and show you how they got to number one in Google. The trouble is, if no-one is looking for this term, this number one ranking is going to do nothing for you.
Taking things a step further, if certain keywords are sending you traffic, Google Analytics will also tell you the bounce rate for that keyword. I.e of those who came in the site, how many instantly left again. If too many people are leaving straight away it is a pretty good indication that those users don’t see your site as being inviting or relevant enough.
How: Carefully monitor the statistics found in Google Analytics Keywords report found under Traffic Sources.
Action: Use this information to refine your keyword targetting, if your optimisation keywords are bringing in no traffic then put pressure on your SEO company to target more popular search terms.
If you find that the bounce rate is particularly high for certain keywords then you may want to think about weather those keywords are relevant to your products and services. If they are then there may be some design feature which are putting people off.
- Popular content
Why: You don’t need to do all of the hard work yourself, let your visitors tell you what content they like, by looking at the kind of content people are looking at already within your site you can get a good feel for what is popular and create additional content around this.
How: Check out the Top Content report under “Content” to see what pages bring most users to your site.
Action: Monitor this information regularly and create content around the topics which attract most users. This step works great when combined with the social bookmarking tip in number 2!
Going more advanced
Once the basics above have been mastered to inform your online marketing activities, then you can start mining into some more of the data to really get to know the ins and outs of the site.
For anyone selling online, Once you become familiar with analytics I would also recommend setting up the E-commerce functionality in Google. This will tell you success based upon revenue allowing you to place specific ROI figures on each marketing channel.
Google Analytics does have it’s limits however, its not great at tracking multi-channel marketing campaigns but we’ll leave that discussion till another day 
