5 Site Metrics Every Small Business Should Track
Many site small business owners’ eyes glaze over when people start talking about analytics, click through rates, and abandonment funnels. Really, there’s a lot of jargon that goes with measuring a site with analytics. Small business owners should be paying attention to their site analytics because the data provides useful insights into their site traffic, which ultimately leads to more sales. If you’re not paying attention to your site analytics, your business is leaving money on the table. The problem with most analytic packages is that they’re large and confusing, providing tons of data without much instruction. Fortunately, there are only a few really important metrics that small businesses owners should track to get the best results. It’s like the 80/20 principle: these are the 20 percent of metrics that provide 80 percent of the most value to small business owners. The Tools First off, you’ll need to install tracking software. It’s usually only a matter of installing a bit of javascript in the footer of your site’s design. If you don’t know how to do it, your designer should be able to very quickly. There are tons of stat programs out there, but Google Analytics gives me almost everything that I need to track. It’s robust and free, so it’s the perfect analytics program for small businesses. Setting Up Goals After you’ve set up Google Analytics on your site, you’ll also need to set up a few goals. Goals are the foundation for most of the metrics you’ll track. You can define goals for when a visitor completes a sale, or signs up for your newsletter, or anything else. (Here are some great examples of goals you can create.) So for now, start tracking your single most important goal, like completed sales or newsletter subscriptions. Once you get the hang of how Analytics works, you can add other important goals. (Here’s how to set up a goal in Analytics.) The Metrics You Need to Track Now that you’ve got your goal set up, you’ll start gathering data on your site. Here are the most important metrics that you’ll want to track for your small business website: 1. Conversions Conversions are the biggest thing that you’ll want to track. Conversions are the number of sales divided by the number of visitors that come to your site. Many site owners are clueless as to their site conversion rates, and if you don’t know this basic bit of information, you won’t have a baseline to improve your site with. Goal conversions allow you to effectively see lots of great things such as what page on your site makes the most sales, the referring site that led to the sale (ie. Google, Twitter, etc.) and where people leave the “sales funnel” and stop the purchasing process (more on that later). These are important insights for your site. If you can improve your conversion rate, you can make more sales, which is the reason you have a website for you business in the first place, right? 2. Referrers A [...]