Put Your Small Business Strategy into Action with Web Analytics

The use of Web analytics can lead to profitable rewards. The information garnered from your Web traffic can not only influence decisions you make about your website, it can also reveal the best ways to refine your products, services, and operations. 

The key is to determine the data that will be most helpful in creating a business strategy. Whether you want to improve your product or service, know how customers navigate your site, or determine how you are doing compared to your competitors, obtaining and interpreting data will help you create the best strategy for your business. Here are a few ways to do this:

• Focus on website redesign: Many Web analytics tools show the actions being taken on your site. Features in Google Analytics, such as In-Sight Analytics and Funnel Reporting, for example, can indicate if your site is not functioning with certain browsers. These features can help you make your site more accessible to more users.
• Attract your intended customer segment: The benefit of knowing the geographic region or demographics of your visitors is that it helps confirm your site is attracting the visitor segments you want. If your site is targeted to gain new visits from people in the northwestern United States, for example, a map overlay chart and a traffic sources report can summarize whether your site is meeting expectations. To determine demographics of your traffic, analytics tools such as Compete and Quantcast can break down users by income, gender, and ethnic background. Measuring beyond the number of hits your site gets can help you refine your efforts in attracting the type of customers you want.
• Get guidance on where to place a survey or offer: Analytics data can not only indicate the type of actions taking place on your website but also explain why they occur. For example, if high exit rates are noted, you can produce a survey that pops up when visitors leave the site that captures why they left when they did. Survey Monkey and Zoomerang are two survey tools that allow you to create surveys and designate which pages they appear on.
• Measure competitiveness through benchmarking: Analytics can help you answer two important questions: What is driving your site's success, and how well is your site doing relative to others? The ability to benchmark can give some indication of business attraction as well as attraction to a site. Panel-based analytics such as Compete and Quantcast offer comparison opportunities.
• Reveal how revenue is generated online: Web analytics can indicate the revenue generated by your website. AdSense data captured with Google Analytics is one way to do this. Moreover, funnel analysis (how visitors navigate from one page to the next) and heat maps (where visitors look on a page) can further determine improved ad placement for better visibility. E-commerce tracking, tagging product pages used in an online purchase, can help identify segments where visitors have left the page before making a purchase.