Your website development is a potential gold mine. It can take your business from so-so to WOW! Statistics can help you, you just have to learn how to use them.
Website stats tell you a variety of things. They can show you which products are doing well and which are not. You can learn what visitors like and dislike about your website development. Are your keywords working? That can be explained also.
When you start planning your business, you need to develop a business plan that will help map out where you see your sales going from one year to the next. With an online business, this can be accomplished through website statistics. These are measurements of various activities on your website that directly relate to your business.
Your Website Statistics.
Traffic is paramount. If you don’t get traffic, sales will not follow and your business will stagnate. A marketing plan will detail how to get traffic. It’s not a foolproof way, however.
You will need to measure your efforts to see if they are working. This is where statistics come in. Do you know what to measure? Here are a few examples:
* Unique visitors (how many different people visit your site).
* Keyword analysis (which keywords bring in traffic and which don’t).
* Conversion rates (to track when visitors progress from reading to actually buying).
* Webpage analysis (see where visitors go to when they are in your website).
* Page views (how many people visit each unique page on your website).
These are just a few of the stats that you will be interested in knowing. When you first begin marketing your site, statistics can help you find out if you’re on the right page, so to speak.
Do the keywords you use drive traffic?
While you can gather statistics monthly, sometimes it takes a few months to identify a trend. Analysing a trend can show you if your current plan is working. As such, you should not make too many changes to your plan, allowing several months to see if anything is working or not. When a business is in start-up mode, it will take that long to get an accurate measure of sales.
Site stats give you a starting point. Without some way to measure your business efforts it’s like shooting in the dark – you don’t know if you’ve hit or miss. Looking at all the statistics together gives you a better idea of what to change first in an attempt to improve your business.
So, if you have not instituted a way to measure vital information pertaining to your website business, it’s time to do so. There are software tools (both free and paid) that can help you compile these statistics. It’s also possible to employ specialised companies to measure and analyse this data, advising you about your next move. But, for small online business endeavours, using software to compile the data and your own brain to analyse it will suffice.
Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today!
