Who's visiting your website? Analytics will help you find out

Having a website for your business is one thing, but have you checked whether it is actually doing its job?

Who is visiting your site? Are they spending anything? Where are they from? What time of day or night do they visit? Did you get more visitors after you advertised in the local paper?

What many business owners may not realise is that the answers to these questions are at their fingertips using analytics packages, some of which are free.

Web analytics software gathers data and presents it in a format you can use to make business decisions. This gives you access to information such as how many people viewed your site for the first time, the keywords they searched for when they found you, what links they clicked on and the “bounce rate” – how long they stayed before leaving.

One of the issues that puts small business owners off analytics is the word itself. Analytics conjures up an image of IT boffins sifting through complex data. And while that’s not uncommon at the sharp end, the basic features of these tools – those the everyday user is most likely to need– are easy to use.

The most well known and widely used analytics package is Google’s own, Google analytics. It’s free, and there is even an official YouTube channel with easy-to-follow video tutorials.

Dr Aleksej Heinze, co-director of the Centre for Digital Business at Salford University’s business school, says you should concentrate on gleaning information about the “three Vs” when you view your site’s statistics. These are: the volume of visitors – how many people visit your site; the value of visitors – what do they spend; and visibility – how visible is your brand for search engines, social media networks and other sources of traffic?

Heinze says: “Think strategically about how you are using your website and what you would like to know to measure the success of your website performance.”

Liezl Hesketh runs The Room Link, a business that matches rooms in South Africa with potential tenants. She initially experimented with Google Analytics on her personal blog, so that when the time came to launch her business she was prepared.

“We linked up analytics from day one, and it was amazing to watch the stats and metrics grow from nothing to a fairly busy site,” says Hesketh. “This made us realise that we could change, test and tweak things on the site, then measure them to see what the impact was.

“Initially we outsourced it all to a small digital agency. I am quite pleased we did as there was so much going on at the launch, we just didn’t have time to get to grips with learning analytics too. My husband got involved and did one of Google’s courses, so he is more of a whizz than I am, but the more I use it, the more I learn.”

Using the data, Hesketh and her husband were able to make some crucial business decisions.

She says: “People access the site from different devices at different times of the day. It’s mainly desktop during the day, but after hours, it switches to mobile and tablet. When we first started, about 80% of traffic came via desktop, but that has dropped to about 50%, which meant we had to beef up the mobile user experience on the site as we don’t have a separate app.”

Another important metric was traffic from social networks. “We soon realised that we get very low click-throughs from Twitter, but very high on Facebook – so we switched our focus to Facebook advertising rather than Twitter advertising,” says Hesketh.

Katrina Gallagher, of web marketing firm Digitangle, helps clients develop digital marketing strategies. She says: “Analytical tools enable you to be better informed about your business, your customers, your competition and future opportunities, but the data is useless unless you take action.”

Analytics packages could be especially helpful in helping clients understand why their web traffic takes a dramatic turn, she adds.

“Google Analytics has made it easier to cut through to the important information about your business by adding ‘intelligence events’. These highlight anomalies in your data, for example, an unusually high or low number of visitors from a certain location, which you can then act on or trace back to your marketing activity.”

Jeremy Greenwood, director at Greenwood Magnetics, uses Google Analytics and LeadForensics, a paid tool that tracks who has visited the site.

“They say it is difficult to say which half of an advertising budget works and which half is a waste of money. Analytical tools help to reduce wasted expenditure on advertising,” he says.

But it’s not all about sales and visits. A crucial metric in helping develop your future strategy is finding out how people visit your site. With the rapid rise of mobile, knowing how many people come to your site via mobile devices can provide valuable insight into whether you should invest in redeveloping your site to make it mobile-friendly, if it isn’t already.

Chris Brown, head of marketing at WorkMobile, says using analytics tools has made a dramatic difference to the firm’s profits.

“Using Google Analytics and the other tools has allowed the team to optimise our website and more than double online conversion rates (from 1.75 to 3.75%), converting more of our paid and organic traffic to new registrations,” he says. “This has led to an increased number of high value accounts coming on board, contributing six-figure sales revenue to our bottom line.”

Analytics packages

CrazyEgg: provides easy-to-read “maps” of user activity, such as a heatmap of where people clicked on your site.

Clicky Analytics: gives you access to real-time data, allowing you to respond quickly to user activity.

Church Analytics: also provides real-time analytics and has a user-friendly interface that could be less daunting for novices than other software.

Kissmetrics: features a range of useful tools aimed at commercial sites.

Free resources

If you don’t have the budget for paid-for tools there are free-to-use ones, such as:

• website.grader.com
• bufferapp.com (social media scheduling and analytics)
• moz.com/followerwonk/analyze (Twitter follower analysis)
• viralwoot.com (Pinterest analytics)
• iconosquare.com (Instagram analytics)
• bitly.com (shortens and track links)
• Google analytics

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