The close of the month is a great time to evaluate any changes you made at the beginning and see how they’ve performed.
Even if you didn’t make any changes, reviewing your analytics is essential to understanding how your business is running. Reviewing analytics isn’t just about data collection – it’s about data management and insight. Here are five tips for reviewing your website’s analytics and how you can make the most of the insights you gather.
1. Choose your sources wisely
Right off the bat, Google Analytics is one of the easiest ways to get your website’s analytics. It’s free, it links up directly to your website with an embedded code, and it compiles your data nicely. However, if you want a broader view of your analytics, including cash flow and other financial data, to give some context to your website data, an all-in-one dashboard will be your best bet. Markaaz is building an all-in-one dashboard so you can view the tools you need (including your analytics!) to run your business in one place. Learn more about the dashboard at the end of this blog!
2. Have a reason
Before even opening Google Analytics or your dashboard, it’s essential to have a goal in mind. The raw data can be overwhelming and distracting, so keeping in mind what you’re looking for is an excellent place to start. Here are some examples:
- What roadblock am I investigating? For example, cart abandonment, engagement drops, or time spent on landing pages.
- What metrics do I need to look at to understand this roadblock?
- How can I monitor and improve it through the data I receive?
Once you have a specific idea about where to start, you can better understand the raw data and develop actionable insights. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in random reports and triple your time spent on analytics, which nobody wants to do.
3. Build data literacy
This one is pretty simple – you need to understand what you’re looking at to use it. To start, group your data into three major data types:
- Reference data, which covers business categories like plants, currencies, and lines of business.
- Master data, which is about entities such as your website, suppliers, products, and customers.
- Transactional data, which details events like purchase orders, invoices, and payroll runs.
Not all of this can be accessed through Google Analytics. Still, it would be best if you had the complete picture of your data to understand the minute details better. Once you sort out your raw data, you can know if you have the correct data sources or need more information.
4. Understand your past data
Most of the current work done in analytics encompasses descriptive analytics – that is, a historical look back to determine why something happened. For example, this could mean understanding why sales dipped during a certain period or why specific forecasts were off. Broadening these efforts gives you the full scope of your website’s performance and allows you to see the historical impact of different actions to predict future outcomes.
5. Visualize your customer journey
A potential customer moves through three typical stages before making a purchase:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
In each stage, they are moving from understanding their pain point to evaluating options and making a final decision on how to solve it.
To make sure you effectively move your potential customers through these stages, you need to understand how users move on your site from the first touch to buying. You can do this by looking at the analytics for specific pages on your website. Which landing page do new users typically fall on, and where do they go from there? If you notice a high drop-off from that initial landing page, maybe you aren’t effectively directing them to the next stage. Or perhaps they’re getting to the next step and subscribing to a newsletter instead of making a purchase, so you need to revamp your call to action. Either way, your customer journey is where you’ll see the most immediate turnaround, which comes from analytics.
The bottom line
Understanding your analytics is essential to growing your business, but sometimes it can be overwhelming. But if you choose suitable sources, know what you’re looking for and what you’re looking at, reference your past data, and understand your customer’s journey, you can make the most of your analytics and take calculated steps towards your growth.
Markaaz’s upcoming dashboard is the best way to access cash flow insights, view invoice statements, get your business credit score, and discover website and customer analytics. It also seamlessly integrates into our directory of over 100 million pre-verified businesses and the payment solution we are building to support small business growth.
Join Markaaz today and be among the first to access our transformative features.
