Basic Analytics and Insights Every Business Owner Should Know

Analytics Will Help You Be Better

Website Analytics

Website analytics offer a wealth of information.  If you want to improve traffic to your website, you need to pay attention to the analytics in order to understand your customers.

Know Where Your Traffic Comes From

One of the most important analytics to know about your website is where your traffic is coming from.  For instance, if most of the traffic to your website comes from Facebook, you will want to concentrate on that platform because that is where your target audience is active.  If on the other hand, your Google referrals are low, it may mean there is a problem with your SEO, keywords or backlinks.  It may also be possible that Google does not recognize your website as having high-quality content.   Knowing this information will help you better target key social media platforms and fix any website issues that may be preventing your website from ranking high in search engines.

Improve Your Bounce Rate

Are most people coming to one page on your website and never moving into other pages?  If this is the case, your bounce rate is likely high.  If your website analytics show a high bounce rate, you want to look at each web page and see where you can make improvements to draw people to other pages.  This may be as simple as adding a few links to other pages where appropriate, or you may need to rethink much of your content.

Learn What Content and Blog Posts Your Audience Likes

A quick review of your website analytics will show you what pages people visit when they come to your website. Do you promote these pages or do visitors find them through searches?  If they land on your pages based on searches, you are doing something right and your SEO is probably on target. You will also learn which blog posts are popular and which ones are not.  Analyze this data a little further to see if there are any patterns in the content subject matter or type of post (how-to, lists, educational, etc.).  This information will allow you to create blog posts to better serve your audience.

Facebook Insights

Post Performance

One of the most important aspects of social media is engaging your audience.  You want to make sure you check insights frequently to see how engaged your audience is, what types of posts they like and if they are clicking through on links.  Give them more of the posts they engage most with, but don’t only post that type of post.  You want to be sure to mix up the type of posts between video, photos, links and even text.  The point is to increase the type they like best while still mixing it up enough to keep them interested.

Call-to-Action Effectiveness

You want to pay attention to your call-to-action (CTA) statistics.  You will also want to change your CTA from time to time to create interest in the CTA.  If people are not clicking through on your CTA, change it or highlight it in some way, such as in your cover photo.  The point of the call-to-action is conversions, so if you are not getting them you need to change your strategy. Paying attention to the stats allows you to be on top of this.

Audience Demographics and Habits

Every business page is unique.  Under the Post section in insights, you will be able to see when your audience is online.  This will help you post at times that more people likely to see your post.  You will also be able to see if your Facebook audience aligns with who you think your target audience is.  For instance, if your target audience is female and over 40, your demographics should reflect this.

Twitter Analytics

If you have not checked out Twitter analytics yet, you need to do this now!  Twitter analytics, like those on Facebook, are quite good.  You can see which tweets are popular, how much reach you have achieved, and what tweets were the most engaging to your audience. Twitter also gives you very detailed audience information that can be helpful in getting to know your Twitter audience much better.

Never assume your audience is the same on different platforms.  You may have a female over 35 audience on Facebook, but a may have a male 25-35 audience on a Twitter. This is why you may need to target your marketing to the platform and one really good reason to pay attention to your analytics.  You need to understand your audience in order to market to them effectively on each social media platform.

Of course, managing your social media and understanding the analytics and insights is not for everyone. If you find yourself distracted with social media or not having the time to effectively service your clients, you may want to hire someone to manage this aspect of your business for you. You want to be the most effective you can in your business in order to expand your business. This may mean you need to concentrate more on your clients. For this reason, I offer a variety of services that will free up your time and allow you to concentrate on what you are best at in order to grow your business effectively. Check out my services to see how we can work together to grow your business!