Small Business Marketing Tips: 5 Time Saving Web Analytics Checks

A Dashboard can be adjusted so that metrics normally checked are available for quick verification

Okay, so analytics can feel a bit overwhelming. You know it’s important to your business. Your heart just feels it, but you’re also feeling marketing, sales, suppliers, employees, and a host of demands too long for this sentences let alone a blog post.

Well you are in luck. Many aspects of a web analytics solution can be checked in short order. If your analytics is dependent on only you, here are a few quick places to start when you just have a few moment to review.

1. Trends in a metric - this can be tricky when facing a ton of data, but you should be able to see a trend in visits, time on site, pageviews, bounce rates, and others. If you are examining these metrics repeatedly, see point 5.
2. Map Overview - If you understand where you are doing business, then you should see visits from your target regions. Give this report a quick glance, or even better, select segmentation combinations (see here for more on segments)
3. Funnel - Setting a goal and a funnel means you have an expectation of how visitors will navigate your site. Like a leaky pipe, you’ll quickly see which segments of a website needs attention when you review a funnel analysis. The pages to review or guide your web development team will be clear.
4. Content Report -- Look at the bounce rate and exit rate data -- do they make sense to the way the site is laid out? A quick review can give at lease some idea of which content to examine, even if you must return to
5. Dashboard -- if you find yourself repeating the same metrics, that is telling you it’s time to add those metrics to the Dashboard.

One last tip (and it ties to the 5th point in some ways) - some people believe that all you need is a few specific metrics to understand any business. Not true.

The metrics needed are based on your online properties, so there’s no one silver bullet. The way you consider pageviews may be great for a blog, but bounce rate may be more importance if you are trying to sell products across multiple webpages. In other words, the online marketing of your business will dictate the best measurements to check. Not the other way around. Just give yourself or your business team enough time to check metrics and dimension while addressing business activities on the go, but certainly plan a deeper dive when there's a down time.

Okay, gotta go.. 🙂

PS Use an alert to report updates or changes in a web analytics metrics. You can adjust the sensitivity such that your email receives alerts for a 25% drop in traffic or 100 unit drop in traffic - whichever would require an adjustment to your priorities.

Ok, that's 6 tips. Know any more?