The Local Marketing Stack

Web Analytics

Zone 1 • Difficulty: • Free Options Available

The goal of web analytics is to help you understand how consumers are finding and interacting with your website. Beyond just a “hit counter,” true web analytics can answer questions like:

• Where are my customers coming from?
  Not just where are they coming from digitally (like Facebook, Google, or Twitter), but physically–are they concentrated in a particular country, state, or metro area?
• What content do they find interesting?
  Which pages get the most views? When people visit those pages, how long do they stay?
• Are my ad campaigns working?
  If a customer sees my ad, do they end up on my contact page (or checkout page, if I’m an eCommerce company)? What is the average amount of transactions driven from various channels?
• and many, many more.

Despite a promising start in the mid-2000s, Google Analytics has become incredibly complicated and is now too difficult for many small businesses (and marketers) to get much value from. But this great guide from Simply Business can help you get started.

And even if it’s too overwhelming or time-consuming for you to dive into the data, simply installing the code on your website that collects this information can establish a data trove that future consultants (and other software products) can help you mine and interpret.