As a small business owner one of your most important web tools should be Google Analytics. It will help you stay up to date on your web visitor’s experience and the actions on your website. It will answer key questions such as, where do your visitors come from? What keywords are they typing in to find you in search engines? What page are the leaving on? Plus, it will allow you to track what steps a visitor took upon entering your site, all the way to making a sale.

An analytical tool such as Google Analytics can also help improve your website functionality. It will allow you to gain access, set goals and be notified when these goals are met.  Monetize your Pay-Per-Click Marketing efforts by focusing on the metrics that matter most to your business.  If you own an e-commerce website, you especially should monitor your Return On Investment (ROI) as well as monitor your sales volume.

The 5 metrics to track, measure and analyze

You want to ensure that your budget is well spent.  Some of the key elements that you should pay close attention to when gathering data from your website are listed below.

• Visitors – it’s important to know who is visiting your website and how they came across it.  The ‘Visitors’ metric provides valuable information such as Total Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Map Overlay, and Bounce Rate.  These particular dimensions can tell a lot about the visitor’s experience and relevance of the information they have come across.  This is a great way to answer questions such as: Where do my visitors live? Are they returning? New? What time of the day did they visit?
• Traffic Sources – a metric that provides in depth information about the user’s sessions and its origin.  The Direct Traffic category provides details about the users that have accessed your website directly by simply typing in your website’s domain address in the address bar of their browser.  The Referring Sites dimension can offer valuable information about the Referral Sources that are delivering visitors to your website.  In the Search Engines dimension you can explore your visitor activity that came from the various search engines available on the web today.  Here you can also segment your Paid and Non-Paid Traffic if you are using a Pay-Per-Click Marketing platform such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions, or Microsoft Advertising.
• Content – perhaps the most valuable of all metrics that Google Analytics provides.  In this particular section you can find out how valuable and engaging your content is on your website.  Break down sections of your website to individual pages and urls to analyze the value of it.  What page are visitors leaving on? Is it an email newsletter sign-up or checkout? If not, it may be time to re-evaluate your site to make the process easier.
• Goals – tracking and analyzing your conversions has never been easier.  This particular metric offers creation of conversion funnels and setup of individual goals.  An individual goal can be considered a contact form page on your website or a funnel that outlines a process that was taken toward the purchase of a product.  Proper goal creation for your website has a great deal of importance as it shows whether or not your customers are purchasing your products and services.
• Custom Reporting – a relative new feature to this analytical tool yet very valuable. The custom reporting option in the Google Analytics platform lets you create reports by selecting only the metrics and dimensions that are of your interest.  To save you time, these custom reports can also be e-mailed directly to your Inbox for a review without the need of interaction with the Google Analytics web interface.

Why Track, Measure, and Analyze Your Web Traffic?

Without an analytical tool such as Google Analytics your cannot not track your Return On Investment (ROI) nor are you capable of measuring your website success as a whole.  A beautiful website must all produce results. Stay on top of your visitor activity and ensure that your website is gathering the data that will excel your small business.

Does your company use Google Analytics? Or do you have a specific Google Analytic question? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Are you a small business or start-up that is stumped on how to get people to come to your site? Increase your web traffic by following these steps.

Google Analytics

First, make sure Google Analytics is installed on your website. With this free program you’ll be able to watch your web traffic increase. If you don’t know how to do add Google Analytics code, contact the person who created the site and have them install it. This free program is great for not only tracking the amount of visitors, but also finding out the details of your visitors, such as: Where did they come from? What keywords did people type in to find you? What page did they exit on? How many people came to your site when you sent out an email newsletter?

Have an online marketing strategy

Before you tackle the below, figure out what is your goal. Is it to increase traffic? Brand awareness? Have people sign-up for your email newsletter? Buy a product? Make sure you keep this goal in mind while you do the following. To find out how to create your own, read “How to create an online marketing strategy.”

Keywords

Make sure your keywords are listed in the copy on your site. If you are a photographer in St. Louis and do not have the text that says “St. Louis photographer” your site will not show up in search engines when people search for “St. Louis Photographer”. If your entire site is in Flash, again, it will not show up in search engines. Why? Because Flash is all images, not readable text that search engines can scan. So, how do you find your top keywords? Look at Google Analytics. They list your top keywords that people entered in their search to find your site.

Have a blog

If you are new to blogging, make it a goal to post on your blog weekly. Then, once you become more familiar with blogging, post 3 times a week. The more keywords you mention in your blog that relate to what you are promoting, the higher your search engine ranking will be. Talk about what inspired you to make your product or tips for using your product.

Have a Facebook fan page

Think about this: your clients are not going to log onto your website everyday, but more than half of all users log on to Facebook in any given day. That is over 175 million people you could potentially reach with a daily status message talking about your product. For more reasons why you should have one, see my recent article: Why your business needs a Facebook Fan Page.

Use Twitter

Twitter is a great tool to find more customers. However, don’t just tweet about your blogs. Also, tweet about what interests you. Social media is all about building trust. People buy from people and businesses they like. To find people interested in what you sell, go to search.twitter.com and type in your keywords. Follow the people that are looking for what you provide or are in your target market.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

This plugs in your keywords, so search engines can find you. A client or customer doesn’t see these words, they are in the background source code. For example, a St. Louis photographer would have words such as “St. Louis photographer, photography for newborns, St. Louis, wedding photography, etc.” Pretty much any words you can think of that describe what you do. If you use Wordpress, a great tool to do this yourself is the All-in-One SEO plugin.

Advertise online

There are many options online. The most popular being Google Ads and Facebook Ads. The good news is that ads starts as low as $1 per day, so it is easy to try an ad for a month on both and see which works best.

Comment on Blogs

When you comment on blogs, this provides a link back to your site. The more links to your site, the higher your rating with Google will be. Make sure you leave genuine feedback.

Have an email newsletter

In your email newsletter, promote your website with links to a particular story, product or blog post on your site. Also include links to your Facebook fan page and twitter account, so people can pick which way they prefer to follow you.

Give away something for free

Hold a contest for subscribing to your email or Facebook fan page. Or give away a “white paper” – free tips from your industry. Promote with print advertising and online on your blog, Facebook page, and Twitter.

Did you enjoy these suggestions? Do you have any more? Feel free to leave them in the comment section.

Do you need help in setting up any of the above? Contact me at becca@bauerhaus.com.