In most businesses, numbers, and measurements are indicators of performance, whether it’s sales numbers, counting the number of customers that walk in the door, tallying the number of projects won, etc. When these numbers aren’t achieving the goals that were set, you can make adjustments to try to improve the statistics and hopefully add to your bottom line.
Your website and social media platforms work the same way. By using analytics to measure user statistics, you collect a wide array of information on visitors to help you make strategy decisions. In analyzing the numbers, you can see what is the best time to post content, what content your audience is looking at, the location of your audience, and much more.
There are many different analytics products out there, and there are developments and new software almost daily. With all of the different options out there, you have to choose what specifically you would like to track. Here are some ideas:
Have a plan
Integrating analytics into your website is great, but it’s even better to have a plan. Why are you wanting to collect data? What type of data do you want to collect? A way to answer these questions is to come up with some goals, from visitors, to sales, downloads, advertising revenue, etc. Many analytics software packages have ways to input and track your goals so it’s all in one spot.
Track early and often
If you can choose what statistics are important to you and the best tool to monitor them before you build your website and start your social media, you will have a chance at more accurate measurement. If you integrate the tools during design, it tends to be easier to insert the coding needed for the software to communicate and operate with your site. Plus, wouldn’t it be great to have statistics from day one?
General website statistics
There are several products that can monitor your site; to choose one, you need to determine how you want the software integrated on the site, what works with the software that drives your site, and whether you want software on your server or in the cloud. Google Analytics is the most popular software out there. It’s cloud based, so you add coding to your site for Google to track. A server-based software is Piwik, which has several options to integrate into web software such as WordPress and Joomla. Those are just two examples…there are many more products out there to measure web data.
So, what do you want to know about your website?