Now, more than ever, the importance of analytics in digital branding is critical. With the abundance of data (big, medium or small) available it would be detrimental to your brand to ignore this information.
Processing this information and turning it into clear, meaningful analysis can ensure you are constantly improving your strategy. Making informed decisions based on actual performance as opposed to educated guesses eliminates the "shot-in-the-dark" approach to marketing success and establishes a systematic process that can directly correlate marketing efforts to actual performance.
For majority of small to medium businesses, this is the missing link between online efforts such as social media posts or blogging and actual business success. How do you qualify or quantify success of a blog post? Quote submission form on your website?
Here are our top 10 small business analytics and how they can help you do some starting analysis for your online efforts:
1. Pageviews (Most Consumed Content)
Simple and to the point - which pages are viewed the most on your website. See which pages visitors engage on a regular basis. The home-page may be the most viewed because people have it bookmarked or remembered, but any of the other pages which get high pageviews could hint at interesting content, particularly when it comes to blog posts. |
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This can be a crucial part of your content direction - discover which topics or segments of interest the visitors are consuming most and focus your content creation towards audience needs.
Analytics turned into insightful analysis with a simple measurement!
2. Traffic Sources
While you may be working hard to increase search engine results, your traffic volume might be coming from a completely difference source: referring website? social media? The traffic sources breakdown helps you determine the origin of your visitors. |
| Click to enlarge image. In this case majority of the traffic is coming from social networks, which makes sense as our blog posts do get shared on a variety of different social sites and it seems to be resulting in clicks! |
Perhaps some of your digital marketing goals can include increased visits from referral sources - did you recently guest blog for someone? Have someone mention you in their blog? These could be tactical ways of increase reach and focusing on the performance of a specific traffic source.
3. Referring Websites
Speaking of referrals, knowing which websites or web pages link back to your posts or pages can help you identify niche locations for your business. |
| Click to enlarge image. T.co in this case is a Twitter link, but right underneath you can see that techvibes.com website brings in second most traffic. Thirdly, since we setup this blog as a subdomain it also counts as a referral to our nrdigitalbranding.com hub. |
4. Technology/Operating System
Another important measure to keep in mind: what type of technologies are your digital community members using? This can guide your web presence so that it is properly setup to be viewed on tablets, android devices, iphones or any other technology capable of loading a web page. |
| Click to enlarge image. If you look above there is a good mix of Windows, Android, iOS and Mac visitors. |
With this information you can optimize your website to optimally perform across all of these devices, browsers and operating systems. In case you missed our 2013 SMB Holiday Wish List, make sure you add responsive design as part of your "must have" list. Responsive web design simply means having a mobile, tablet and desktop friendly version of the website (it appears nicely across all types of devices).
Additionally, if you discover that majority of your visitors come through an Android device - it might be worth looking into developing a mobile app to make it easier for them to consume your content or engage with your brand.
As you can see - this information can open up a lot of possibilities for building your digital branding effectively.
5. Landing Pages
Knowing which of your pages are engaged the most can help you identify what type of content or information draws interest for your audience (and which does not). Usually having a secondary dimension of sources can also help you discover how the visitors are coming to these pages.
This is a great way to connect your digital marketing efforts to business goals. Show how your search engine rankings (SEO), social media efforts, blog comments, etc. are performing!
6. SEO Queries
Alright so by now we all know that keywords are equal to (not set) value - and this is most likely going to disappear in the near future due to privacy issues. However, there is still a way you can uncover the CTR (click-thru rate), impressions and clicks from the keywords people search. You do have to have Google Webmaster Tools connected to Google Analytics in order for this to work. Done correctly, you should start seeing the following data: |
| Click to enlarge image. You can see the overall impressions, clicks, average position on Google and CTR. |
If you don't know where to find this information: it is under the Acqusition-Search Engine Optimization-Queries location in GA (Google Analytics):
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Although not a complete overview of keyword performance, it does provide some data to show the amount of impressions and clicks for focused keywords.
7. Geo Location
While many small, local shops operate in a specific geographical area (especially retail based organizations) it is not surprising to get visitors from surrounding areas - especially if your brand becomes know for a certain specialty or product. |
| In this case most visitors are from Waterloo (as expected), but there is a large secondary number of Toronto visits meaning that the web pages are drawing interest beyond the tri-cities and reaching out into the GTA. |
Knowing the visitor's location can help you expand you presence in different areas, and helps you provide service to ALL customers - not just those within close proximity of the physical location.
8. Page Drop Offs (Customer Path)
This is a very cool tool as part of the overall GA reporting system. It allows you to view the pathway a visitor took throughout your site - I usually prefer to use landing page as a starting point to see where the path begins and follow it to the drop-off page.The drop-off is a very important factor in this view since it tells you after which page the visitor decided to exit your website - having high drop-offs after the 1st or 2nd interactions is not necessarily a bad thing, it could mean that the visitor was able to find what they were looking for without having to go through multiple pages.
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| Click to enlarge image. Here you will see the visitor flow of all the people that entered the website through the home-page. If you look at the SEO web page (large white bubble with information) - this is information displayed by simply hovering over the page. It shows the amount of visits, people that dropped-off (left the website) and people that went through to other sections of the website. |
This view can also help see the pathway someone took to get to an actionable goal (submitting a contact form). It is also flexible in the visitor information - segmentation is available by location, source, medium, social network, etc.
9. Goal Performance (Form Submission, File Downloads, etc.)
Setting up goals to measure certain actions can help you directly connect visitors actions to your marketing goals - how many leads (contact form submissions) or PDF file downloads (content consumed) did the website have for the specified period? This is a great way to connect digital strategy with performance to discover how successful your tactics are.A good, comprehensive guide to GA goal setting can be found here.
10. E-Commerce Conversion
If you do run a website with purchase options, it would be beneficial to hire a developer to implement e-commerce tracking through GA. It has the ability to track average order value, source of purchase (if someone came via Google Search or a Social Media Network to complete a purchase), CTR (click-thru rate) and many other transaction-based information.Although we do not have a shopping site here, we do work with organizations which track this information. If you need to get familiar with this option, take a look at this comprehensive guide from Google's own Justin Cutroni (analytics guru at Google).
That is our top 10 small business analytics for website measurement list for any small business getting their feet wet with analysis. It can be an overwhelming start, but once you get familiar with the reporting tool and provided data - the analysis opportunities are endless.
This is by no means a complete list and we would love to hear what types of analytics your organization finds useful in guiding its digital branding strategy. Leave a comment and let us know!
