The majority of UK businesses now have some level of online presence
and one of the brilliant things about the digital world is that
performance is measurable.
When should a start-up look at this? Yesterday! Never underestimate
the value of historical data, especially if your product/service
experiences seasonal demand. In its simplest form, historical data can
help you forecast peaks and troughs, with significant implications on
areas such as your business cashflow or marketing budgets.
Tell me more
Analytics software (eg Google Analytics)
are remarkably easy to install and offer potentially endless
performance benefits. To give you a taster, here are three
analytics-based tasks to help boost your start-up’s website and business
performance.
1 Referral tracking
Any decent analytics programme will tell you where traffic comes
from. This can be anywhere from a search engine or marketing email, to
someone typing in your website URL into the address bar.
These statistics include what are called “referrals”, essentially,
other sites linking to you. Referrals include business directories,
comments posted in forums, affiliate sites and links from articles
you’ve had published. Knowing where you are getting traffic from allows
you to decide where to focus your energy and budget on building traffic,
while monitoring brand mentions and opportunities. These brand mentions
give you first-hand access to: people mentioning your company;
accolades; and complaints.
If someone has had a bad experience with your business, you can get
in there early and limit the damage. If someone is telling their friends
how great you are, get their permission to use them as a testimonial,
ask them what they liked, let as many people as possible know how great
you are.
You’ll find plenty of Twitter search tools that complement analytics referral tracking here.
2 Search monitoring
Most analytics packages enable you to track the exact queries being
used in your own website’s search bar. This is invaluable customer
intelligence. You can see what people are searching for, which pages
result in the highest interest, which searches return no results, etc.
You can even see trending in market demands. If you monitor spikes in
certain terms being used, you can see where the customer interest is
heading. The possibilities for this information are huge, and can really
help steer your start-up in the direction your customers want – instead
of the direction you think they need.
3 What technology your visitors are using
What browser do your visitors use? Are they on a laptop or mobile
phone? Knowing how your visitors view your page is important. Imagine
the changes you’d make to your marketing plan if you knew most of your
traffic came via mobile.
You can also highlight performance issues on your site. I know one
update Stinkyink.com released had... let’s just say “interesting”...
repercussions for Internet Explorer 6 users, which missed testing, but
analytics bought the issue to our attention.
Craving analytics yet?
I hope those points have opened your eyes to the benefits to be
gained from analytics, even on a low traffic start-up site. Be inspired
and go implement it now – or dust off your analytics package and have a
tinker.
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