Is your website working for you?
As the economic pressures continue more businesses are turning to their websites for ways to connect with new and current customers.
However, some businesses still have no idea how their websites are performing, despite the fact that it can cost nothing and take very little time to add incredibly powerful reporting tools to any website.
When it comes to developing an existing website or looking at new directions, the more information businesses have at their disposal the better.
Imagine a shop owner who could find out how many people came into the shop each day, which products people picked up, how long they spent looking at each product, how they moved around the shop, how many people who picked up a product actually went on to buy it and how they found the shop in the first place.
That level of business intelligence would be invaluable and would help the shop understand its current performance and ensure the owner makes the right changes to improve impact.
This is exactly the kind of data available through website analytics tools. Every single website automatically creates a log file which can reveal this information. Up until a few years ago interpreting the raw data typically required the use of sophisticated (and costly) specialist software.
The advent of Google Analytics a few years ago changed all this. It’s free to use, you just need to set up a Google account and include some code on your site and it takes around 15 minutes at the most to do.
It can be added to any website and once in place it gives access to a vast range of information that can be searched and browsed by hour, day, month or year.
As businesses turn to their websites and look to invest precious time, effort and budget to developing the site it is absolutely imperative that they’re working from an informed base and not guesswork and out of date supposition.
And this raises a wider point. Website analysis ensures any development is as effective as possible, but it can also indicate wider business trends.
Too many organisations still fail to see their website as an integral part of their business and treat it in isolation. A sudden increase in visitors to a website or in the number of people who find a website searching for a particular key phrase doesn’t happen in isolation. These trends reflect behaviour that will provide useful insight into wider business performance.
That’s why it is so fundamental to get the right tools in place and know how to use them. Given that they’re free there’s really no excuse.
What do you think?