If your small business website doesn't have any form
of web statistics, you don't have full control of your website and need
to correct this now. Website statistics give you vital information
about the visitors to your website; how they found your website, what
keywords they used to find your website if they used a search engine,
how long they stayed and their general location. When you make changes
to your website statistics give you the information needed to determine
whether the change was beneficial or not, or whether you need more
visitors to decide this.
Having used a few website statistics
packages, I use and highly recommend Google Analytics for the following
reasons. Please note that other website statistic packages are
available, some offering the same advantages as Analytics, some
offering other benefits.
1. It's easy to set up and install
You can set up a Google Analytics account in about 10 minutes and
provide a small piece of code to your web developer to be placed on
every page on your website you want to track (which generally is all of
them, although you can't add this to non HTML documents such as Word
and PDF documents). Depending on how your website has been written,
this may need adding only once. No changes to the web server are
required and the company that hosts your website doesn't need to get
involved. There's nothing stopping you having Analytics installed
alongside website statistics software that uses the web server logs to
generate information and you can combine information from both sources.
2. Easy to use and understand.
Collecting statistics about your website is of no benefit if it's
hard to get access and if they are difficult to understand. Google's
developers have done an excellent job of creating a web application
that is easy to use and information is presented in an easy to
understand fashion. Information is shown in layers with the ability to
drill down to a low level of detail. For example from a pie chart
representing the source of the visitor (search engine, referring site
or direct), you can see the top 5 websites and search engines that have
sent visitors to your website and then, for search engines, see the
keyword phrase typed into the search engine. Alongside this is
information such as the average number of pages the visitor looked at,
the average time on the website and the bounce rate, which is the
percentage of visitors that immediately return to where they came from.
This information is particularly important when analysing the
effectiveness of a pay per click campaign.
3. Create your own goals and dashboard
All small business websites must have a goal. It may be to make an
online sale, request a free white paper, make contact by phone or email
or visit a physical shop. If the goal is electronic then we can measure
it with Analytics by setting up a goal. An Analytics goal is simply a
page or sequence of pages that the visitor has to interact with to
achieve your goal. For example if you are selling directly from the
website you will have a checkout process where the visitor, having
checked the products they want to order in a basket, enters billing and
delivery details followed by payment details. This may be on one page
or several and payment may be via a third party website, but you can
track to the point where the visitor leaves your website. Obviously
this can cause misreporting as payment make not take place. Analytics
presents these pages together as a sales funnel, showing where visitors
abandoned the process. This could highlight a technical problem with a
particular web page, or maybe the page layout is confusing, remember
your competitors are a few clicks away.
Once you've seen the
information Google provides you can create your own dashboard, with the
information you want to see at the level you need to make decisions
about your website. And if that isn't enough you can have the dashboard
emailed to you in a variety of formats every day, week, month or
quarter so you have no excuse for forgetting to look at them.
4. See how people use your website
One of the great features of Analytics is Site Overlay - the
ability to see which links on a page are the most popular. What is
interesting is that you can evaluate physically where you position
links on the page, remember you can link to the same page in more than
one place. Finding a hot spot on the page means you can add more links
there, but don't forget to come back and look at the statistics.
5. Automatically updated
Updating software is an activity best left to other people. If your
hosting company offers statistics they may update the software when a
new release comes out, but if you've installed the statistics software
you will need to do it. Analytics is updated by Google and you don't
need to do a thing, so you gain the benefit of bug fixes and
improvements as soon as they are released. Google continually add new
functionality, the ability to segment traffic and analyse different
segments side by side is one recently introduced feature, meaning you
can continually increase your understanding of the people who visit
your website and measure the effectiveness of changes on your website
and outside of your website.
6. You can move hosting companies
I've moved a few websites from one hosting company to another and
whilst you might be able to transfer statistical data, possibly even
import it into the new host, it's a real pain to do. Analytics doesn't
care where the web server is as it collects it directly from the
visitor's web browser, so changing the company that hosts your website
does not mean losing your historical website statistics.
7. It's free!
And it's Google, so it's unlikely to disappear or become a
subscription service overnight and the data held is secure and private.
If
you don't currently have website statistics available, you can have
Google Analytics installed today (provided your or someone else can
install Google's code on all of your web pages) and be understanding
how visitors interact with your website tomorrow. It is the first and
vital step in increasing the revenue from your website.
