Let me guess, you have a website, and you have heard (or read) about analyzing your web traffic, but you’re so busy you’ve never really had the time. Don’t worry about it, I can guarantee you that you’re not alone!
Like anything we do in our small businesses you can quickly make the task of analyzing your web traffic overly complicated at the beginning and just get to a point where you can no longer be bothered, but if you do that you’re missing out on a very rich information source about how your customers interact with your site. The days of creating on “online brochure” are long gone and we all need to do some analysis on our websites.
Here’s a quick start guide on how you can get started mining your web site data,
Step 1: Install a web analytics software package
This one should be pretty obvious – we need to be collecting information in order to analyze it. Over the last while I have been flip flopping between Google Analytics and Have a Mint for my analytics software, but recently I have decided to stick with Google Analytics. I chose this path for a number of reasons, 1) GA is free – Have a Mint is inexpensive, but free is better when you’re running your own business, and 2) I use Google’s tool set for a lot of other stuff so I figured why not keep it all under one roof.
Installing GA couldn’t be simpler, simply sign up for an account and then add some Javascript code to all the pages that you want to monitor, which should be all of them, that’s it you’re done, go worry about some other aspect of your business!
Step 2: Hurry up and … Wait
I am being serious here, in order to do any type of analysis you’re going to need to be patient and let some data collect. I would recommend that you wait anymore from four to six weeks before you really start making any changes based on the information you clean from your website.
While you’re waiting, come up with some goals for your website, ignore the obvious stuff like page hits, page views, etc. and instead concentrate on something like conversion rates. For example, Reach a 2% conversion rate for new visitors filling out the request for more information form by a specific date. For examples on how to write your goals see my earlier post about the SMART principle.
Step 3: Automate it
I know that we’re all busy and entrepreneurs are some of the busiest people I know so once you’ve identified a few reports that you like to see why not automate the process of receiving them so you have one less thing to worry about. GA allows you to easily automate the e-mail delivery of any reports in a variety of formats. I suggest you set this feature up once you’re comfortable with the tool.
Step 4: Analyze it
The analysis of the data you collect is by far the most time consuming step in the entire process, collecting the data is easy by comparison. There’s a ton of data that you can get your hands on, and quite a few folks fall into the trap of trying to look (and analysis) all of it. This is a sure fire recipe for disaster.
My suggestion would be to start with something simple. The fact is that most of our small businesses are not truly global and are kept alive by your local customers. Therefore, you may want to start looking at how your local visitors are finding your website. Are they coming directly, finding you in search results, or from external links. This type of information in invaluable to your business and will help you in understand how your visitors are finding and using your site.
The topic of analyzing your data is a massive one, I will post more at a later date.
Tags: data mining · small business · web analytics2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
Brett,
Interesting post…I found that getting to step three was fairly simple, not requiring the effort that one would think. I too use google analytics and initially found their stats very helpful, even though my site was new, and I was happy to get 20-30 unique visitors a week.
The problem for me became one of getting the reports everyweek, and finding the time to analyze them. That being said, you may have rekindled my interest in investing time to understand what is happening at my site.
Thanks for the interesting article.
Rhys,
Thanks for taking the time to comment on this post. I would agree that the hardest of all these steps would be #3 (and as a result #4). It takes time to truly analyze the data you’re collecting and then make site improvements based on what your seeing.
Good luck, and keep me posted on your progress!
Brett