So you’ve spent money to have your site designed, or bought your software, hosting, domain name, type in your URL and marvel at the amazing website that you now call HOME. It’s beautiful, almost as wondrous as the “major award” that the “Old Man” receives that wintry night in A Christmas Story.
But what now? Weeks go by, and your sales don’t increase, your phone doesn’t ring any more often, and your inbox still has nothing more than the normal Spam, junk mail, and “Cat Chasing Laser Light”, sent by Aunt Ethel. Just because you’ve gotten your site built doesn’t mean that people are seeing it, that it’s going viral, or setting the Internet by storm.
The problem with most small business websites is that many owners have NO IDEA how effective the site is, and just assume that their site is reaching their target audience. So you ask your designer to install a hit counter. Don’t get me started talking about how ineffective and utterly useless that these little tools are at accurately measuring success.
I recommend using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, which not only tracks the number of visits that your site is receiving, but much more.
For example:
Traffic Sources – Are you paying valuable advertising dollars for ads on Google, Facebook, or other websites in hopes of driving traffic to your site? How do you know if those ads are effective? If you’re relying on the site owners to tell you how wonderful of a job they’re doing, then I’d like to talk to you about a great deal on a used car… anyway, maybe later. The traffic sources tool allows you to see which other websites are driving traffic to your site, and which keywords are being used to find you. This not only allows you to more effectively track and plan your advertising budget, but helps you refine SEO.
Traffic By Day – You can not only see how many visits that your site receives, but break down the information by day. Did you run an advertisement on the radio or local paper? Now you can check each day to see if those advertisements have made an impact. Better yet, you can compare this year’s site visits to last year’s to see trends in your visits. Are you gearing up for a major annual sale or event? Compare your stats from a year ago to see if you need to stock more items or have more employees on staff that day.
Traffic By Location – Now you can even track traffic via city, state, or even country, to find out which markets are the most effective. Do you have a local shop that you’d like to take online? Use this tool to measure which states and cities your site is reaching and which ones need more SEO.
These are just a few of the tools and reports available in Google Analytics. There are literally dozens of reports for any time frame that you can generate. If you haven’t taken advantage of this analytical tool, or one like it, you’re really missing out.
Need help installing or using Google Analytics on your site, or do you need to improve your site performance? Give us a call at 859-325-6956 or email us at damian[at]laymondesigns[dot]com.
