Chances are, if you have a business website, you have it for a reason.  And the reason is likely twofold: one, to make sure people who know you can find information about your business; two, you want to grow your revenues by attracting new business.  Not to add one more thing to your already busy schedule, but once you have web destinations, our strategic partner, LocalDirective, asserts you must be able to measure your website effectiveness if it is your goal to achieve a good return on your investment.

Google Analytics: The Easiest Way to Measure Website Activity…And It’s Free

Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of data for the purposes of understanding how a website is performing.   Google Analytics is a free tool that enables you to see clearly into the behavior of those who visit your site.  Everything from information about visitors, pages viewed, measurements such as time on your site, where the visitors came from, and specific behaviors on your individual pages.  It is even possible to customize the information, so you can easily see statistics that are most important for your business.

So Much Can Be Measured That You May Wonder Where to Start

No doubt about it, there is a lot you can measure.  But, what should you measure?

When people first start reviewing their web analytics they typically focus on number of visits. While looking at these numbers will give you an idea of how well you are directing traffic to your site, focusing on the number of visits is not a good way to measure your website’s effectiveness.  So why’s that, you may ask?

If you are like most business owners, you developed your website with the hope that it would generate sales or leads. People who simply go to your website and quickly leave do not result in sales or leads.  These people got to your website and either didn’t like what they saw, didn’t know how to take action, or weren’t interested in your product or service. You can see then the hits and visits are nice, but…do they really tell you everything you want to know?

Website Effectiveness: Usually Measured In Conversion to Sales or Leads

As a starting point, LocalDirective’s analytics experts recommend paying attention to measurements that either directly count revenue-generation activities or that are ‘leading indicators’ of future revenues.  Here are some examples for various types of businesses:

• For an E-Commerce site, it is easy: you want to measure the number of sales you make.  But in addition to that, you may want to measure how many people put one item in your shopping cart, and then left your website.  Or how many people look at reviews before selecting a product.  Some of these leading indicators will surely give you ideas on where improvements can be made to increase your completed sales even higher.
• For a Business-To-Consumer site, aside from direct actions such as coupons downloaded or forms completed, you might want to deeply understand your various targeted segments.  For instance, you may want to understand the differences in behavior of visitors from various referral sites.  How does your Bing Pay-Per-Click program work?  How does it compare to organic traffic from that search engine?  And how does social media work for you?  Is Facebook better than YouTube, in terms of traffic that takes desired actions on your website?  Knowing where your traffic comes from and the differences in behavior of visitors from those referring sites will help you spend your marketing dollars more wisely in the future for even higher conversions.
• For a Business-To-Business site, hands down it is crucial to classify visitors into appropriate sales pipeline segments, particularly if they don’t take the main conversion actions of providing contact information in exchange for white paper and/or video access.  While it takes a little more advanced analytics knowledge, it is possible to segment visitors by source and onsite behaviors, for instance, which will help you to learn where you lose visitors in your sales funnel.  This valuable information will enable you to develop improvements that deliver a higher close ratio.

It is clear to see that a good part of using analytics effectively is spending time determining how to best reflect indicators of future revenue or direct measures of immediate conversion. If this sounds valuable but you don’t know where to start, LocalDirective, who specializes in online marketing and business analytics, can help.

Now’s the Time to Get Started

If your website is attracting visits that are not resulting in sales, you should work with a digital marketing agency that knows how help you with all aspects of building a powerful online presence.  Soup to nuts, LocalDirective is an agency that can help you develop or revitalize your website so that it is a high-converting site and then can set up your Google Analytics to help you reach the highest conversion rate possible, maximizing your Return On Investment for your website and online marketing programs.