Web analytics are the “collection, reporting, and analysis of website data”. The intent of web analytics are to create and identify measures and goals for your website, and then employ data from the website in order to achieve said goals. Essentially, web analytics are a two-fold process. Web analytics allow people to create goals for their webpage, and then to analyze data webpage in order to compare the results to their metrics. Web analytics are therefore useful to business owners in numerous ways. Primarily, these metrics allow business owners to set goals and standards. Goals and standards are essential to any business, large or small. Furthermore, web analytics allows businesses the opportunity to increase how they are doing in “key metrics”. We will touch more on what these key metrics are, and how businesses go about forming and maximizing them.

Basics of Web Analytics

Web analytics are a topic that people have written whole books about. However, for the sake of brevity, web analytics can be broken down into three main steps:

Creating Business Objectives and Goals

Identifying what goals and objectives your business has on their webpage is critical to the success of utilizing web analytics and data. Goals and objectives act as a metric that will be the basis of your web analysis. For example, how can anyone (in a general sense) know how to measure success or failure if they do not have a standard to compare it to? Therefore, pre-set goals and objectives will act as a standard.

These goals vary greatly from business to business, and can be anything from improving website viewership to increasing how often people who interact with the webpage actually purchase items. Regardless of the goal itself, these objectives should ask hard questions of your business and webpage. These questions can be as vague as “what is the purpose of this business”, or as specific as “how and why do we want to increase webpage viewership”. It is essential that these questions are critical and are answered honestly in order to achieve the highest level of success for your webpage. In turn, these objectives and goals will stand as your metrics for success or failure.

A great tip when creating goals and objectives for your business’ webpage is to make sure that they are DUMB. Now, this does not mean that these goals are overly simplistic. Instead, it means that your goals should be comprised of four factors. These goals should be Doable, Understandable, Manageable, and Beneficial. This acronym breaks down your webpage and business goals into easy steps, and while somewhat over-simplified, can be extremely helpful.

Create Calls-To-Action 

Calls-to-Action on websites are something that many people are probably familiar with, but do not realize. Calls-to-Action are prompts on a website that tell users to take a specific action. A well-known example would be a “Read More Here!” prompt at the bottom of a webpage article. These prompts should align with the goals of your webpage. Therefore, if one of your goals are to boost how long viewers stay on your webpage, then a good prompt would be something along the lines of “Read More Now”. However, if different goals require differing prompts. For example, if your business goals include boosting the amount of viewers that make a purchase than your call-to-action may be more along the lines of “Buy Now!”. Regardless of the prompt, it is essential that they align with your objectives in order to propel your webpage forward.

Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are a metric that help webpage owners to understand how they are doing against their objectives. KPIs, similar to business goals, differ from business to busines and webpage to webpage. However, a similarity remains; one cannot gauge their success without a metric to gauge it against. These metrics can be something simple as webpage viewership. However, unlike the webpage goals/objectives, KPIs are more specific. Instead of wanting to boost viewership, which is a goal, a KPI would indicate that the webpage owner wants to increase the amount of clicks on their page from 1000 per month to 3000. In this example, “clicks per moth” are the KPI whereas increasing clicks per month is the goal/objective.

Useful Web Analytic Tools

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the top rated webpage analytics tools on the market today. There are many perks of using Google Analytics for your small business webpage. For example, Google Analytics is both fully automated, but also customizable. This allows business owners to shape their analytics to fit their goals and KPIs, while also not having to constantly monitor the analytics. Another useful aspect of Google Analytics stems from how easy it integrates with other platforms. Google Analytics is downable and appears on your computer dashboard similarly to many other add-ons.

Not only is this platform very helpful, but it is also free! The utility of Google Analytics, in combination with no cost, makes it an essential tool for small business owners attempting to crack into web analytics. Also, there are also paid version of Google Analytics to fit the needs of anyone who feels the free version is not enough coverage. The ability to get free or paid coverage by Google Analytics is a very unique trait for small businesses, or those who intend to upscale.

Yahoo Analytics

Yahoo Analytics offers many of the same perks as it’s counterpart, Google. However, Yahoo Analytics carries a much smaller “market share” than Google Analytics. This can be seen easily when examining that Google Analytics operates for over 13 million websites, whereas Yahoo Analytics only covers about 8,000. Despite the fact that Yahoo Analytics is not as large as it’s counterpart, it still offers many similar features. While Google Analytics may be the better option (and in some cases the best), it is still worth the time to examine some of the pros and cons of Yahoo.

Useful Analytics to Track

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an excellent tool for grabbing the attention of new potential customers. In theory, quality email marketing tactics will allow for more viewership to be directed to your page. Increased viewership is good for numerous reasons. Primarily, increased viewership will allow you to have more data. This data will show you not only how many viewers you have, but how long they stay, what pages they exit on, and how many are converted to purchasers. Furthermore, many business owner’s goals are simple to boost viewership–this means that email marketing would at least check off one goal or objective in itself.

Leveraging Social Media Channels

Keeping your social media pages up to date with fresh, concise, and relevant content will help to optimize the platforms. In doing so, business owners will help to draw viewership to their webpage through referrals from social media pages. People love to see social media pages that have new content every week or few weeks, especially when this content is relevant and interesting! On the other hand, social media pages with old, out-of-date, or irrelevant content can be detrimental to the optimization of ones’ webpage. Therefore, business owners should work equally hard on their social media pages as their webpages. This includes staying updated on newer social media platforms, such as TikTok.

Written by Brian Kennerly, Pennsylvania SBDC Lead Office Marketing Team

Brian Kennerly is currently a Graduate Assistant at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania while pursuing his Master’s in Business Administration. His hometown is Upper Darby, PA, and he attended the University of Virginia for his undergraduate career.