Lunch & Launch Recap: Web Analytics For Your Start-Up & Small Business

Written by Innovate New Albany@InnovateNA9 years ago

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You’ve launched an impressive website for your business. You’ve invested in online advertising and created a strong social media presence to drive traffic to your website. You think it’s working. You think you’ve got traffic. You think it’s accomplishing your goals.

But how do you know for sure that it’s working for your business? How can you confidently show your boss, your investors, or your clients that their online efforts are paying off?

With web analytics, you can measure, research and report everything you need to know about the success of your efforts, and identify opportunities for improvement.

Brad Griffith, President of Buckeye Interactive, gave an informative presentation to a group of entrepreneurs on March 20 at Innovate New Albany. The event, entitled “Web Analytics for Your Start-Up and Small Business,” was part of SunDown RunDown’s monthly Launch and Learn Series.

Brad began his presentation by explaining the importance of having a web strategy. A web strategy is simply an extension of your offline business strategy to your online communication channels. You need to know what purpose your website serves, and the goals that it has.

Common website goals include e-commerce, lead generation, advertising, building a membership, sponsoring affiliate links, or providing information about a topic. Your website could have more than one of these goals.

Brad provided examples of each type of goal, the metric used to measure it, and the level of difficulty to report on it.

As one of the most popular and free options, Google Analytics was the featured tool of the presentation. Brad walked the group through how to sign up for a free account and spoke in detail about the key performance indicators. These indicators are what you can look at to measure results, and consist of page views, visits, visitors, bounce rates, and average time spent on the site, among others.

With Google Analytics, you can track goals, events and e-commerce to determine how many visitors are utilizing your site and all you are offering on it. Examples of tracking include contact form submissions, email list subscriptions, file downloads and product purchases.

Brad gave the group a thorough overview of the Google Analytics dashboard, including an explanation of each section, how to customize the time period you’d like to look at, and how to generate reports.

He also listed nine of his favorite Google Analytics reports, the information that each provides, and how to access them.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to demonstrate the traffic and utilization of your website. Brad recommends that every business owner tie Google Analytics or some type of web analytics tool to their website.

If you have questions about measuring the success of your website or would like more information about Google Analytics, email Brad at Buckeye Interactive, or visit their website at http://buckeyeinteractive.com.

Innovate New Albany, the city’s incubator for technology startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses, features 16,000 square feet of space within the New Albany Business Park’s Signature Office Building, 8000 Walton Parkway.