Why Website Analytics is Important for Your Business Growth

In this article, I am going to go over some of the reasons why tracking your business activities using Google Analytics is essential to your success.

Studying the metrics of what you do is a very important part of having a successful business. Because without looking at the numbers you really can’t know exactly what is working and what isn’t. Of course, you can make assumptions, but it’s better to use facts to help ensure that your time and money aren’t being wasted.

Fact: If you can’t measure it doesn’t exist.

When you set goals, they should be something that can be expressed in numbers. Things like clicks, page views, sign-ups, and sales. Using analytic tools will help you collect valuable data about your business.

Now let’s go over some of the things tracking can do for your business:

Get to know your visitors

When you started your business you probably had a pretty good idea of who your audience would be. Chances are you created marketing materials based on your ideal audience and it worked. But, can it work better? Once you learn how to dig deep into your audience’s demographics (especially the people who’ve converted), you’ll know exactly how you can tweak your marketing campaigns to improve your results.

Know what content is working

When you set up analytics you can see what blog posts, articles, and other content is getting more traction. You can see views, comments, and more, which can help you judge better what type of content you need to create more of.

Understand your traffic

Using the data, you collect, you can find out who is sending the most traffic (converted traffic) to your website. This is useful because if it’s coming from one person (like an affiliate) or one website, you can give them some extra attention to encourage more of the same.

Study your competition

Nothing is more important aside from your visitors than your competition. You can learn a lot from your competition when you can get to know everything they are doing including the keywords they use, the prices they charge for their products, and even their conversion rates it will help you stay ahead.

Discover what works for your audience

When you study your numbers, you can find out if the ideas you have will work or not. Some will, some won’t. You can find out what works, optimize it and do more of it by looking at the data.

Drop things that don’t work

When you know your numbers, you can drop projects that aren’t working and focus on the ones that are. It’s not like the past when you spent your money on a campaign and then had to let things run their course and watch your money go down the drain when they didn’t work.

Running your business by the numbers can really help you take control of the growth in ways that you may not have considered. It’s very important to learn about metrics, goal setting, and how to determine correlation, because not everything is not always as it seems when it comes to the numbers.

There are several different analytics tools available but I recommend using Google Analytics. Google analytics is the original free analytics software. It offers so many features and benefits that it would be impossible to go over them all in this space.

How to use tracking analytics to plan where your business is going.

Analytics can tell you what happened, why it happened, what will happen and how you can make it happen. It can consist of any goal that you’ve set for your business and when used properly will help you make your business more successful.

When you use data to help you learn about your business, your competition, where you stand and where you want to go, you’ll truly end up with a better business than you ever thought possible. Today, data can be so predictive that it will almost give you directions on what to do next to boost your business and make it better.

Stay ahead

As you look at the data you have, and you can see what happened and how it happened, you can take that information and repeat whatever worked so that you can get even better results. You can also use that same data to add complementary products and services or even change direction altogether. You can use the thing you learn to stay ahead of trends in your industry as well. With evolving trends and fads, it’s important to understand how to collect and transform data from analytics into actionable steps because it will help you achieve key business objectives.

Foresee challenges

Every business faces challenges and you can even predict some them by looking at data. For example, some businesses are seasonal in nature, even though in some cases there is no reason for them to be seasonal. But, if you check the data you might find that your business has times where you make more sales. You can use that information to pump up advertising during the off season.

Understand your own audience

Analytics can help you get to know your audience even better. When you first start a business, you choose who you think your target audience should be. You set up all your marketing campaigns with that in mind. But, you might find through analytics that you have a far different audience than you thought. This can help you narrow down and optimize your marketing materials so that you can grow your business.

When it comes to growing and planning your business using predictive analytics can help you discover insights into what is working and what isn’t. Which will help make the right decisions for your business and accomplish your goals much faster.

Understand your competition better

Another great thing you can do with analytics is understand your competition. By keeping an eye on them, you can actually learn what your audience wants and what they will be most likely to respond to and your business will be better for it.

This is especially true if they’ve been around longer and you know for a fact that they’re profitable and good at what they do. Then it’s even more important to learn all you can from them.

Want to learn more? Get in touch.