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Google Analytics is an extremely powerful, yet simple to use package, providing an insight into your business online but also offline. Here is an article which gives you all the bits you need to know in order to find out how well your business is performing online.
If someone asks me to explain how analytics works, I like to use the real world adage of a camera being suspended above a supermarket. Just like the camera, watching people enter, interact, browse, try, and buy in the real world, analytics does exactly that and more for the digital world. Analytics not only records all that and more, it then provides this information in workable summarised charts and tables.
Sure there are a few bits I wish it had, but I do believe it gets you 90% of the way there.
So how can you use the data to pull out the information you need to assess your business performance?
Metrics for B2B business’
If your business is primarily selling to other businesses you may look at a slightly different set of metrics. That being said, if people purchase something directly from your site, refer to the paragraph below as this covers conversion metrics and insights. Ok, so, if your site is there as a lead generator or used as reference material, what are the most important metrics? My suggestions would be:
– Visits (how many people visit the site)
– Bounce rate (how many people leave the site from the same page they arrived on)
– Average time on site ( how long people stay on the site for)
With these 3 metrics you can get a good overview on how your site is performing. Although it is site and market specific I would suggest a bounce rate of around 30 – 40 % is a good place to aim for. Similarly the average time on site I would suggest around 2 mins is a good place to be.
Metrics for B2C business’
Firstly if you are selling something on your site that people can purchase online, you will be interested in things like conversion rate, total conversions, average sale price. The things I would suggest are really important with these metrics, are the factors that impact them. Remember that pricing, stock, range etc. play a big part here; all of which are offline factors, but analytics helps you identify any issues. For example, if you see that one month you have 100 sales and the next month you have 10 sales but the same on page metrics (Visits, bounce, average time on site) it would suggest that the quality of the traffic has remained the same and is not the cause of the decrease in sales. At this point I would look at things like: Seasonality, Any problems within the booking process (check on different browsers), Pricing of products, Availability of products and other relevant factors in conversion rate.
Analytics also offers an e-commerce tab, which, once configured correctly, allows you to view average order values, ROI (return on investment) and other important business metrics. This tag is a bit more tricky to install but worth doing if you have a transactional site.
We have a whole range of blogs on analytics, helping you to get the best from it so please feel free to take a look around and comment; ask questions if there is something you would like more information on.
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