Built with, a company that analyzes the technology behind websites, reports that over 27 million live websites are using Google Analytics. Since this product is used by the vast majority of all reported websites who use some form of visitor tracking, chances are you’re using it too. But even though it’s free, are you getting your money’s
worth?
With the proliferation of analytics tools there should be an easy way for small businesses to use all that collected data to help improve their business prospects and revenue opportunities. Therein lies the challenge: It still requires a lot of time and expertise to study the data to gain insights. And most of the time, the biggest challenge is that the
data is incomplete.
How the Data Is Incomplete
A visitor visits a website, likes what they see, but isn’t ready to make a purchase and instead registers for the company’s newsletter. Several weeks later, they receive an email and click through to read a blog article. They read two other articles before clicking a link in one of the blogs to a product and making a purchase.
In this example, several different systems – all with their own tracking mechanisms – could be involved. Let’s break down those systems:
- Website with analytics.
- Email marketing system from a third party that has its own tracking system.
- Blog powered by a separate system with its own analytics.
- A shopping cart, also with analytics.
When the owner looks at their website analytics they see that their website had a visitor referred from their blog, but may wrongly attribute the original source as the blog itself. Because the blog system was separate, the website analytics displays the last URL the customer visited before coming to the website, which wasn’t even the original blog article they visited.
On top of that, a purchase was made, but the website owner has no clue that the same person visited the blog. They also have no idea that it was an email that triggered the initial visit because the shopping cart system is also separate. To the shopping cart system, it was the website that referred the customer.
Your head is probably hurting trying to follow this logic, and you’re not alone. A typical small business owner doesn’t have the time nor the expertise to analyze website visitors across different systems to make informed decisions. In this scenario they have no idea that their blog contributed to a sale initiated by an email marketing campaign. They may decide that blogging and email marketing aren’t worth the effort and stop doing both, which would be a detriment to their business.
Improving Your Data Collection
If the data you’re collecting doesn’t give you a complete picture of what’s really happening, then what’s the point? This was the exact question we asked ourselves. We felt helpless when our customers would seek our guidance, especially since we were in the business of building websites. We could tell them how many visitors, hits, page views and other useless metrics they were getting, but to give them true insight was difficult and time consuming. To help improve both ours and our customers’ businesses, we had to not only integrate all of the common website functions together, but make sure the analytics worked together too.
The latest version of BannerOS, our platform for managing a website, integrates analytics across many different website functions. This provides a more complete picture of the data needed to make business-impacting decisions. When a visitor comes to our customers’ websites, they can easily follow the path through various systems to determine what initially triggered the visit along with other useful demographic data such as location information about their visitors. This helps them invest in efforts that are producing results and stop the activities that aren’t. Hubspot provides tools to help companies make informed decisions with their data. Their software can provide customized experiences to website visitors based upon data collected throughout their previous interactions. The more customized the experience, the
more likely a potential customer converts to an actual customer. Infusionsoft provides a similar approach as Hubspot. Their solution lets businesses collect data across multiple touch points, then use that data to automate the marketing process.
It’s important to analyze the data and not exclusively rely on marketing automation solutions due to the fact that customer profiles and businesses change. All those changes should be evaluated on a regular basis to ensure what the data is telling you is consistent with your business goals.
Collecting data is par for the course. Everybody is doing it, but small businesses have yet to really gain much insight from it. Thankfully, new technology is improving the choices businesses can make by creating a more complete data profile.
Mark Cenicola is the President and CEO BannerView.com and the author of The Banner Brand: Small Business Success Comes from a BannerBrand, Build it on a Budget.
Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched Startup Collective, a free virtual mentorship program.
