Your SMB Online: Analytics Software & Keeping up With Your Basic Metrics

If you are a regular reader of the .ME blog, you’ve certainly followed up on some of the extensive SEO and CRO tutorials published here. Understanding the specificities of how your online presence affects your business is a necessary step if you want to thrive in the competitive world of online business. But for small business or eCommerce shop owners, as well as entrepreneurs in general, monitoring and understanding metrics when optimizing a website, or simply devising an SEO strategy, may present a somewhat tiresome task.

It is understandable that once you reach the back end of your website, probably through Google Analytics initially, you can get a little bit discouraged. When you face a moderately complex analytical software for the first time, you are bound to feel a little overwhelmed. Finally, when you begin to realize that this sort of insight can be both equally powerful and challenging, that’s when the troubles really start. But even if you are investing in your marketing and all that you have to do is read the reports, you should also mind your crucial metrics and KPIs to make sure that your marketing company is delivering.

The trick is to save time and still have a firm grasp on the state of your website and your sales funnel. After all, you have a business to run. So, if you’re still a one-man marketing team, here is a short and basic tutorial on how to employ and get the best results out of your analytics software.

Get to know your (Google) Analytics

When you start inquiring about digital marketing and the back end of the whole show, one of the first tools that you will come across in your search will probably be Google Analytics. Naturally, there is a reason why this tool presents a firm foundation for many other analytics software of a somewhat similar sort, with its most reliable and above all useful data insights.

With Google Analytics, you can monitor the time that visitors spend on your website, track page views, sessions, bounce rates and much more. This is an essential part of your analytics and the most valuable information that you can gain. Be advised that other software may deliver a somewhat different piece of information, or some numbers just won’t match. But in general, you should get relatively uniform and reliable information regarding your vital metrics and the overall state of your website.

Time

Naturally, you want your visitors to spend as much time as possible on your website. If you are pushing great and useful content on your blog, through an adequate SEO strategy, you are bound to pick up some attention and gain readers. Readers will preferably engage and convert to customers. Even after you make a sale, keeping your customers informed and satisfied might get you a few brand advocates, not to mention referrals.

The way that Google Analytics measures the time users spend on your website is the following: the moment your website’s page loads and a visitor access it – your analytics software will receive that information. The moment your visitor navigates away – your Google Analytics software gets another time stamp and records the time spent on that page.

Page views

This is pretty much a self-explanatory metric. When visitors reach a certain page, that signal gets recorded by your analytics software and sends you a report. Each time that page loads, you get a ping back. Even if there is only one person hitting a refresh button, you will know how many time that button was hit.

However, be advised that your correct URL structure is a crucial component that allows you to monitor your page views. If you have a one-page scrolling website for example, but the content on that page is divided in multiple segments that can be visually perceived as “pages” – you won’t be informed on which page your visitors are, or where they are spending their time on your website.

Therefore, if you want to track and observe the behavior of your visitors, determine where the problems are or where exactly in your funnel they are opting out – each page of your website should have a unique URL, preferably with an SEO friendly structure.

Sessions

At the very end, the metrics labeled as sessions will provide you with an insight on the quality of the entire visit. By combining time and page views, sessions are a great indicator of the user experience, since you are almost able to visualize the browsing process. You know the exact moment when your visitor reached a certain page, you know how much time they spent on it, and when your visitor decided to navigate away from this page. Multiple pages can also be recorded as a one, unique session.

You should always strive to increase the number of sessions on your websites. However, be advised that one visitor can make multiple sessions. In that case, although your sessions are on the increase, you will naturally have much less conversions. This is why it is extremely important to monitor the number of individual users, and determine how much of your sessions were made by unique visitors and how much of them were made by your returning traffic.

Bounce rate

The name speaks for itself. When your visitors reach your landing page, the time they are spending on your website, page views and sessions won’t account for anything if the visitors just leave your website. Your bounce rate tells you how much are your visitors actually interested in your content and your services. It tells you how much is your website actually valuable for unique visitors who are searching for your service or product.

On average, bounce rates can be as high as 50% and you can still run a successful business. Everything lower than that is considered as an excellent bounce rate, but everything above 70% probably means that you have some large issues on your website. Except if you are only running a blog.

The Conclusion

Getting to know your Analytics software will certainly require commitment and time. However, with the above-presented metrics, you will at least know where to start. Once you start monitoring your metrics, re-visit some of our previous content, and learn how to increase traffic and conversions on your SMB website.