You work hard on your business and your website. Learn why keeping track of things is important.
Small businesses have many things to do in regards to building a successful business. Having a strong web presence can play a key role in building and scaling a business. A lot of effort goes into building a strong web presence including, content creation, social media engagement, outreach, link building, etc.
While many businesses put a lot of effort into their online presence, businesses fall short, because they do not track the progress of their online digital presence. How do you know when your online presence is helping your bottom line?
As a business owner you’ve got a TON of things to keep track of, but KPIs (key performance indictors) for your website should be at the top of the list. They help you monitor whether what you’re doing with your digital presence is actually bettering your bottom line (yup, we all know that’s what matters at the end of the day).
So, monitoring important success metrics will help improve your business’s success online. Let’s look a little more into that.
Depending on your business, industry, etc you will have different KPI’s that you will measure to determine success. Some examples may include revenue, net profit, inventory turn-over, customer lifetime value, employee retention rate, and many more.
When it comes to monitoring your website, you need to gather information so that you can measure and track website related KPI’s. This will allow you to better understand if the work that you have been putting in or paying someone else to do, is actually getting results.
But, you can only start to measure website success, if you have a method for collecting information about traffic that is coming to your site.
How Do You Track Website Traffic?
There are many different services that you can use to track website traffic and website visitor behavior. These visitor tracking solutions  will give you a better idea about what visitors are doing when they come to your website and equally important; how they are getting to your website.
By monitoring user behavior, you can gain insight that can help you decide how to make website changes. Furthermore, you will know what parts of your site are adding value and where you need to make improvements.
When trying to decide what software to use that will monitor your website, we recommend using Google Analytics as your website traffic tracking solution. Google Analytics was launched after Google acquired Urchin, a web statistics analysis company in 2005.
Since then, Google has developed the software into what is known today as, Google Analytics which is has a free version and offers in-depth website visitor tracking data. After installed, Google Analytics starts collecting data seamlessly and gives you insightful reports.
Google Analytics can report very simple metrics such as how many visitors came to your site but can also report much more granular information; such as, what was the first page that a visitor arrived on, what device are your visitors using, what countries are they visiting your website from and the list goes on….
Once you have had Google Analytics installed for a while, you can start looking at that information and making website changes to improve your website and ultimately… your bottom line.
Some examples may include helping your visitors find information more easily, fixing broken pages, adding content to webpages and ultimately helping your visitors find your website, stay on your website and converting them into leads and finally paying customers.
Having a website and digital presence without a method of collecting information about your website and tracking KPI’s  is like owning a business while not tracking financial information. In the very least, it is a poor business decision.
