Recent estimates suggest that a whopping 63% of businesses don’t make any use of analytics tools on their websites. Just think about what that means…

Well over half of all business that have invested in a website, have absolutely no way of tracking it’s performance and ROI.

With any other business asset, you’d expect to be able to see what your ROI was month by month, so why do so many business miss out on this?

It seems complicated!

On first glance, software suits like Google Analytics, while completely free, can seem pretty complex beasts, and when you’re already juggling all the requirements of your business and wearing all those different hats, who another thing to learn and deal with?

Trust me, I get it, but allow me to explain.

We’ll mainly be talking about Google Analytics here as it’s the most widely used tool in the industry, but most of what we cover is applicable to other suites as well.

Google Analytics is completely free to use and can be enabled within any free Gmail or paid Google Apps account.
Just visit https://www.google.com/analytics and follow the prompts.

Once activated in your Gmail account, we can add whats referred to as a “property”. Property is the term that GA uses when it’s talking about websites, so we simply go ahead and add a new property with your website URL, and GA will give us a snippet of code that we than add to your website itself. Once that’s done, GA will be able to start gathering data about the visitor’s who are coming to your site.

Why is this important?

GA offers a huge amount of visitor data. None of it is personally identifiable, but you’ll know physically where your visitors are located (down to country / city level), what they searched for before arriving at your site, how they navigate through your site’s pages, which website referred them to you, time spent on each page, bounce rate and a whole host of other information.

Depending on your business, some information will be more useful than others, and luckily we can create custom reports and dashboards that just give you the information that you want to see.

OK, in case you’re starting to glaze over, let’s move on to what this means and why you should care about it…

All websites have a purpose. The most basic brochure style page, right up to a large scale e-commerce store have a specific set of goals in mind, otherwise they need not exist.
That set of goals of course, will differ from business to business, but the core principle is the same.

When a visitor arrives at your site, there are certain steps that we want them to take that are part of your overall business strategy. That might be that you want them to pick up the phone and call you, or fill out an enquiry form. If you’re in e-commerce, you’ll want them to make a purchase. Then you’ll want to look at how you might persuade them to make two purchases.

Remember, 63% of business do not gather analytical data. That means most cannot make sound business decisions based on real data when it comes to their websites. They don’t know how many customers visit their sites without making a purchase, or how a print advertising campaign might be affecting web traffic. They don’t know what problems they’re trying to solve.

The 37% who do utilise analytics however, can use that data to make good, solid decisions about how to improve conversion rates through making tweaks to their sites. And remember, physical stores do this to. There’s a reason why the chocolate bars sit at the checkout at your local petrol station. They’ve learned, based on data, that that’s where they’re most likely to sell.

So don’t put your website site analytics in the “too hard” basket. It’s way to big an opportunity to miss out on!

If you need assistance, we can help. Whether you have an existing site and want to add some analytics software to it, or are building a brand new site, we can guide you through the process and help you to start getting real results.

Contact us for more information.