If you’re reading this, then you no doubt realize how important the online world is in establishing and maintaining your authority. Regardless how big the offline portion of your business is, online is the key to your future success. But let me ask you: how are you measuring your online success?
It’s a difficult question – and there’s no one single answer for everyone. But there isn’t a business (or individual, for that matter) out there that can’t benefit from using an analytics tool to help track, measure, and improve their online presence. I specifically reference Google Analytics, because it is free and best in class, but really any package will do the same thing. What does analytics measure, anyway?
How do people find you?
Wouldn’t it always be nice to know how people find you? You can ask everyone who ends up being a buyer, but when it comes to website customers, you can even find out about people who just came to browse as well as those who make a purchase.
Analytics holds a scary amount of detail about each and every person that visits your website, including:
- What country they’re from (and in some cases, state/province, or city)
- What browser they’re using
- What website (banner ad, director link/etc) they used to find you
You can use the tool to segment these visitors into different groups, and understand the buying patterns of each better. Does your site seem to resonate more with Germans and less with Americans? Is that banner ad a waste of time, whereas the premium directory listing sending in lots of leads? All here, just waiting for you to have a peek.
What do people really think about your website?
In the old days (read: less than a couple years ago), you had to ask customers for their opinion, and hope that enough people took you up on your offer and actually told you what was on their mind. Something of an inexact science, to say the least. Now, you can see your online buyer’s behavior without them even knowing. Consider the statistics that analytics provide:
- Do people linger over your sales pages, or immediately turn away when they find them?
- Do you have key content that nobody ever manages to find?
- Are there popular pages and content that is missing a strong call to action?
These are all fairly easy problems to fix, but only if you know about the problem.
How’s your search engine optimization?
You know how important getting backlinks is. Maybe you’ve researched your keywords and maybe you’ve done a little outreach to get your website more visible in search. But do you measure the traffic search engine send you?
Google Analytics provides data from all the major search engines (not just Google). With this information you should be asking yourself two key questions:
- Are the search phrases you expect to see actually sending traffic?
- Any surprises on keywords you didn’t know you were ranking for?
After all, it just goes to say: you cannot tweak performance if you aren’t measuring.
Andy Hayes is the managing director for Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing firm. Don’t miss their popular Google analytics ebook, a simple yet effective resource to keep your own authority in check.
Web Analytics helps you track whats going on with your blog and helps you refine your sites goals and campaigns
Here are 7 excellent web analytics resources for your blog. I’ve specifically included several programs in here that have cool, useful resources like plugins and widgets for your blog.
Feedburner- Manages RSS Feeds and offers free blog analytics, tracks subscriptions, keywords and etc.
Mint - Excellent, self-hosted site analytics software. The fee is a one-time, $30 flat fee for a license, per site. Super cheap, and you get access to a ton of tools and plugins (called “Pepper”) that extend Mint’s basic feature set via their “Peppermill.”
Google Analytics – Ok so Google Analytics is still an ok free option, but keep in mind that it has some problems, namely underreporting. However, its still a good option for getting a general idea of what’s going on with your blog.
Feedjit - I had to include them in here, as they offer some excellent free widgets for your blog, all in real-time, including a live traffic feed, live traffic map, live recommended reading and live page popularity.
IndexTools – Recently acquired by Yahoo, and soon to be Yahoo Index Tools, they offer excellent options for web analytics, but the prices aren’t listed on the site, so you’ll have to do a little digging.
MyBlogLog – Great social networking site for those with blogs. It has the additional benefit of tracking your blog stats, cool widgets to show who’s visited your site and much, much more. Best of all, its free:)
HitTail.com: Excellent site analytics; their basic package offers man options and allows you to track up to 125 pages per month and up to 100k visitors. All for $9.95, which is a great deal.
