What is Website Analytics?

Website analytics provides small business owners with useful information about your website and the visitors that land on your website. Website analytics works by placing code on your web pages to trap information such as how many visits to your site, where the visits came from, who referred your site, how many pages a visitor clicked on, how long a visitor spent on your site and much more useful information that provides small business owners with rich insight into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

How would I use this Information?

There are many reasons and uses for collecting data with analytics. Armed with knowledge a small business owner can learn and adjust time management, marketing, target marketing and ROI (return on investment) from purchased advertisement. Let’s take a look at real world examples.

Good or Bad Investment?A small business owner makes a purchase for an advertisement from x company. The ad cost $500 for a marketing campaign of 30 days. After the 30 day run the small business owner logs into account at x company and it shows 250 new views, wow, seems effective on the surface but there aren’t any new sales or increase in phone calls, why? With an analytics report you can see how many referrals actually clicked through to your website from the advertisement to make a purchase of a product or service.  Armed with information the small business owner learns there were 0 referrals from the ad, now that explains why there were no new sales or phone calls and the business owner now knows it was a bad investment with no ROI.

Effective use of time!Let’s look at a second example using social media. A small business owner has a Facebook, Twitter and Merchant Circle account to drive traffic to the website to sell products and services. For a 30 day period the owner spends 40 hours on MC and 10 hours each on FB and Twitter. At the end of the 30 day period the owner logs into their accounts to look at the stats. MC shows 755 new views, FB shows you reached 3,700 people and Twitter shows nothing so again on the surface the small business owner thinks MC and FB are doing great. Now armed with analytics the business owner runs a report and finds out that only 1 person actually clicked through to the website from MC, 18 from FB and 42 from Twitter. With this information at hand a small business owner can see a reallocation of time is necessary between the social sites to maximize traffic to the website. In short, spend less time on MC and more time on the social sites producing traffic. Note: these are only examples and not meant to guide anyone from using one social site over another.

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