Why is it important as a business owner to have an understanding of analytics?
- The better you understand who is visiting your web site, and how they are interacting with your site the better you can understand the online habits of customers and potential customers.
In order to capture accurate analytics you will need to:
Create a measurement plan and then implement that plan. In order to do that someone on your team, or your web developer will need to:
- Understand business objective and strategies….most likely for most small/medium businesses that would be the owner, VP or Marketing Director
- Understand basic analytics
- Possess some technical skills
Create your measurement plan
#1. Document business objectives – As a business you need ask “Why do we exist? What do we do for our customers?” Example: Coca-Cola’s Business objective is:
- To refresh the world,
- To inspire moments of optimism and happiness
- And to create value and make a difference.
#2. Identify strategies and tactics –
- Strategies are based on your business objectives and the tactics would be how you’re going to accomplish meeting those objectives.
- For example and taking Coke’s business objective, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness……. the strategy might be to do that through a series of videos
- And the tactics would be how you would make sure people see those videos
Choose Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Measure– A couple of KPI’s may be how many sales you generate in a month and/or the dollar amount of the average sale.
#4. Choose segments – New customers vs returning customers could be segments you’re using to measure effectiveness. And analytics provides you with those numbers by percentage of total visitors to your site.
For example: 55% new customers and 45% returning customers.
Once you’ve defined your measurement plan you will need to:
- Document your technical environments
- Translate your measurement plan into an implementation based on your technical environment
- Implement your plan
- Refine your information over time to keep it timely – things will change
It’s important to understand Goals and Conversions:
There are 4 types of goals in Google Analytics:
#1 – Destination Goal: When a visitor to your site visits a specific page, that’s a goal.
#2 – Duration Goals: Of the people that visit your website how long people stay
#3 – Pages/Screens per visit: The number of pages a visitor sees on your web site
#4 – Event: Play a video or download a whitepaper, or fill out a form.
It’s important to know what you want to measure in terms of goals because that helps you gain a better understanding of your visitor’s habits when they come to your web site.
conversions
- a conversion is simply the result of a goal that you set being met…..in Google Analytics you set up conversions based on goals and you can also add a dollar amount that equates to that goal.
Next week we will tell you how to set up goals in Google Analytics plus share some screen shots and helpful links that will get you started with setting up goals.
Google Analytics helpful links:
This week’s Happy Hour Recap was shot at Merwins Wharf
