“What you don’t track, you can’t measure. What you can’t measure, you can’t improve!”
When it comes to doing business online is not to do it blindly. There are lots of tools available and you don’t have to spend any money to do it!
SMB’s can create stronger businesses by collecting and interpreting data to identify and analyse trends, measure success and help inform future decisions and actions.
Why Collect Data?
There are 5 key reasons you should collect data from your online activities:
- Test Your Keywords
While we may think we understand the words and phrases that drive people to our site your analytics will actually tell you. You can dig into your search traffic to see the most powerful phrases helping people find you. You can see the rate at which people search a term and how searchers looking for a keyword perform on your site. For example, how many pages do users looking for a particular product look at per visit? How long do they stay? Are they new or returning visitors? Does that search term lead to a visit or a conversion?
- Serve your customer better
Using data you can identify patterns in customers behaviour and develop strategies to accommodate their needs. Where are you visitors coming from? How do they navigate your site? How many times do they come before making a decision? Do your reviews and blogs work?. By looking at your analytics and becoming familiar with the page pathways your visitors take, you can improve their experience on your site.
- Measure the value of social activity
Social media reports can help you see how your social engagement works. What activities lead to sales? What time, topic, tool leads to the best engagement?
- Improve web pages
By tapping into your analytics you’ll also be able to find which pages are being used / read and which ones are being skimmed, skipped. By highlighting problem areas on your site you can fix them.
- Measure offline activities
You may attend networking events, expos’, markets, community activities, advertising etc. and your web analytics can help you measure these successes.
You can do this by setting up different URLs for brochures or leaflets / ad to allow you to track which advertising method was more successful. Or you simply measure how many people some to your site after the event.
What tools to use?
There are lots of free tools available to SMB’s with many provided by the applications themselves.
Here is my pick of the free tools your business can start using today.
The most common and widely used free analytical tool. It provides rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness
It will tell you how many people visited your website, how long they stayed there, how many pages they viewed, and whether they were first-timers or returning visitors. It also splits your paid traffic from your organic traffic and shows you the path that people take as they work through your website.
Google Analytics allows you to measure the popularity of your website. But it also allows you to measure its success. For example, you can get information that will give you a good indication of whether a call to action on a particular page is working or not.
Click through to Acquisition > Social, and you see how many visits your site receives from each of the major social networks.
There are a host of other additional features – start playing around and you won’t be able to stop!
Another of Google’s free tools allows you to rotate different parts of your website content to identify which sections and placement convert into the most clicks, and ultimately, the most sales. Through this you can find the most optimal content combination as well as increase the effectiveness of your website and boost customer satisfaction.
A simple tool to gather valuable insight into the success of your content on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.
The search function on BuzzSumo is dynamic because not only can you find your content by entering its title, you can search any keywords, topics, or domains to gauge the social media “buzz” of each.
It’s similar to doing keyword research, but instead of researching what terms have high search volume, you’re looking for topics that people love to share. I’ve used Buzzsumo to help me with the heading for this blog!
For #hashtag campaign tracking, Keyhole offers a wealth of statistics that can help you sort the popularity and success of a branded hashtag (or any other hashtag you choose). You can save a hashtag search so you can quickly and easily refer to it later on.
Social Media Insights
Each of the big social media platforms have their own analytics.
If you are using Facebook to engage with your customers, this free tool is a must. It gives detailed information about your follower counts, likes, comments on posts and much more. The type of posts that work and those that don’t.
Additionally, from the Insights tab, you can set up a list of Pages to Watch, which gives you information on the performance of other Facebook pages.
Twitter provides a 28-day overview of how your tweets have performed in all the major engagement areas—retweets, mentions, favourites, and clicks. One of the most useful bits of analysis here is seeing the impressions of each tweet.
Clicking on any individual tweet in your list will show a complete breakdown of every element of engagement on the tweet
From the Pinterest analytics dashboard you can see growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.
- LinkedIn analytics for businesses
LinkedIn’s analytics include an overview of all the posts on your business page as well as a breakdown of your followers and follower growth.
- Google+ Insights
The insights at Google+ show you visibility, engagement, and audience overviews.
Remember while analytics can provide valuable insights into your business, do not to get too excited or you run the risk of #analysis paralysis!