First, why should you care about that monthly analytics report you receive? (And if you’re not receiving it, contact support@websiteondemand.ca and let us know!)

Because your analytics report is the best tool you have at your disposal for getting more leads, sales or donations from your website.
Now that you’re all excited to start using your analytics reports to boost your sales and leads, here’s how to get started:

1. Choose ONLY one or two ‘metrics’ (measures of performance) that you can improve and that will make your website generate more leads and sales. If your website currently receives less than 500 visits per month, I’d recommend choosing monthly visits as your first metric. You’ll need people coming to your website to get business from it!
2. Choose your benchmark or goal. A metric without context is useless. Let’s say your chosen metric is monthly visits. Last month you received 120 visits. Your goal might be a 20% increase every month. So next month you plan to get 120 visits plus an additional 24 visits.  
3. Decide what actions to take to ‘move the dial’. Where are these additional 24 visits going to come from? Fortunately you have lots of options. The ‘best’, more affordable way is to add new content to your website. If your content is ‘optimized’ for search engines (contains keywords used by your potential clients), then over time these new pages will naturally attract more search engine traffic. There’s also paid methods like pay-per-click ads, banner ads and more. And let’s not forget social media! Create a Facebook page for your business, spread word about your business through there and get your Facebook fans to come check out your website.
4. Schedule your next steps to ‘move the dial’ and follow through. Will you be adding 3-4 pages or getting that new Facebook page going? It’s up to you what you try, just be sure to add performing this next step to your calendar and follow through.
5. Set a note in your schedule to check your analytics next month.
6. Evaluate your results and repeat the cycle next month starting from step 2. Be warned, many changes like adding a new page to your website will take a couple months to see results (increased traffic) from. Others, like using Facebook and twitter, may deliver results sooner. When you receive your next analytics report, look at your chosen ‘metric’ (in our case, we wanted to increase site visits by 20% (120 to 144) and see how well you did. Maybe you only increased visits by 10%. The important thing is to keep at it, adjust your strategy as results come in and don’t give up. Remember, that 10% increase in visits is 10% more than you had last month, and with every additional visitor comes the chance for increase your sales, leads or donations received from your website.

Tags: small business website, how to use google analytics, google analytics, key performance indicators, google analytics metrics

If you're like 99% of business owners out there, your Google Analytics traffic reports may be a little hard to understand. Fortunately, there's 4 simple questions you can use to begin understanding your Google Analytics website traffic reports and gathering insights from them.

Here are the questions to ask after you receive your traffic report:

 

1. How many visitors are coming to your website?

a. Do you have a problem attracting traffic to your website? (feel free to ask us for help!)

b. Also, look for long term trends (is traffic going up?) and seasonality (is there a time of year when traffic is highest? lowest? Why?)

 

 

2. Where are your visitors are coming from?

a. What referring websites are sending you traffic? (e.g., is all the time you're investing in Facebook paying off with traffic to your website?)

b. What keywords are (and are not) sending you traffic from search engines? (getting traffic to your website from industry-related keywords is ideal - not just your business name)

 

 

3. What do you want your visitors to do on your website?

a. What is the goal of your website? It's raison-de-existent. Do you want people to fill out your contact form, sign-up for your newsletter, make a purchase, etc? Deciding your website's goal is critical as you can't "improve" your website until you know what exactly it should be doing for you.

 

 

4. What are your visitors actually doing on your website?

a. Look at your top content and entry pages. If you want people to complete your contact form, are visitors even getting to your contact form page? If not, what can you do to change that? If they get to the contact form page, are they staying on the page or are they "bouncing"? Are they being encouraged enough to complete the contact form?

 

Have questions? Need some help looking at your analytics report or need more detailed information from your analytics report? Feel free to email me at cnorton@alcaris.com.

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