You’ve probably decided that monitoring what customers post about your business online is an important task to implement, but there are other aspects of your business that you must also monitor online:
• number of visitors who access your website and how this foot traffic changes throughout the day or week,
• effectiveness of an email, online newsletter, or other communication that encourages customers to visit your website, and
• how long visitors stay on your website.
Asking customers about their shopping experience, both online and your retail store, is a smart strategy – one that can assist you in better understanding what new goods and services might appeal to them. The process of investigating and collecting this data is referred to as web analytics, where the business owner can make decisions about:
• whether or not customers are responding to messages and information contained in an email message and,
• if certain webpages appear to be more appealing to visitors than others.
Just as there is a variety of tools available for monitoring what consumers post about your business, there is also great array of third party websites that can help you gather information which can be used to strengthen your online presence.
Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) is a free program that can be used to collect:
• how visitors “find” your site, whether they type in the URL or if they are directed from another site,
• your “bounce rate,” which is the percent of visitors who visit your landing page and then leave your website,
• learn how long visitors remain on your site, how many pages they access during their visit, and if they are lead to a certain page on your site because they clicked on an ad you posted elsewhere online,
• view standard reports or create custom ones that provide you with metrics including the number of new visitors who have accessed your site, number of times a certain product was purchased, revenue-per-click, and
• many more useful metrics.
Implementing Google Analytics requires signing up for a Google account, entering the URL for your website, and adding the Google Analytics Tracking Code to your site. Once the system is in place the benefits can greatly assist a business with understanding who is visit the site, when, and where they navigate to. All important statistics when monitoring the effectiveness of a website.
