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As a business professional, you’ve got a lot on your plate. So you might be asking yourself: “Why would I want to add analytics to the mix?” The answer is simple: It can improve your business.

ANALYTICS GUIDELINES

As a business person, you’ve got a lot on your plate. So you might be asking yourself: “Why would I want to add analytics to the mix?” The answer is simple: It can improve your business. The prospect of delving into web, email and social analytics may seem overwhelming, but even investing just a small amount of time can help you increase your customer base.

If this is your first venture into analytics, it’s best to start slow. Figure out what your main business objective is, and then focus your analytics around understanding that. Some basic goals might include:

  1. Finding new customers
  2. Getting a better response rates from existing customers
  3. Getting referrals from customers

Once you have your goal, you don’t have to track a hundred things at once. Instead, track the three things that are most important to you. For example, if your goal is to get a better response rate from existing customers, the three questions you might choose to try and answer could be:

  1. How many people are coming to your website?
  2. How often are they coming?
  3. Where are they coming from?

Once you set up your parameters, check your data once a week or even once a month. If you’re testing something out, maybe you’ll be checking more frequently. But the key here at the beginning is to take it easy so you don’t end up feeling overwhelmed and then dump the idea of doing analytics entirely.

Below is some information about web, email and social analytics to help you get started. Follow these three steps to keep things simple.

  1. Choose a category – web, email or social
  2. Go find an analytics tool
  3. Decide what to track

Web Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics packages in use today.  Other analytics packages include free packages like Yahoo Web Analytics and GoingUp or paid packages like Mint, Woopra, Omniture and WebTrends. Even though it’s free, Google Analytics is packed with many of the same reports you’ll find in higher-priced solutions, so it’s probably the best place to start.

Free Web Analytics Tools:

Paid Web Analytics Tools:

Web Analytics Categories

When you first log into your analytics tool you’ll likely see some of the following categories:  Visitors, Unique Visitors, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Traffic Sources, Keywords and Referrals. See below for a description of each.

  • Visitors and Unique Visitors: The visitors and unique visitors numbers are important because they let you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before.
  • Pages per Visit (PPV): Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. A larger number of pages per visit generally means that visitors find the content on a given webpage interesting enough to warrant additional clicks. A low number of pages per visit may suggest that either the content is lacking or the ability to navigate easily between content is hampered by the website’s overall design/organization.
  • Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.
  • Traffic Sources: Tracking where your visitors are coming from is important for any organization. In your web analytics tool, you should be able to find information about how visitors came to your site. You can then determine which keywords, search engines, referring sites and ad campaigns are driving the most traffic.
  • Keywords (Organic Search): Most websites will see a large amount of traffic come through search engines. Whether it’s paid traffic via search engine marketing or organic traffic from users typing search terms into Bing or Google, you’re likely to see a lot of visitors come to your site through search.

Within your analytics tool, you should be able to see all the search terms that people used get to your website. Looking at the organic search terms can help you to know what kind of content you need to beef up on your website to increase traffic and conversion.

  • Referrals: Referrals are visitors that get to your website by way of someone else’s website, but not a search engine. For example, if you have a link on xyz.com, and someone clicks through to your website from there, then xyz.com would appear as a referral.)

Email Analytics

Most email publishing platforms come with their own built in analytics tools. Some of the statistics these tools should be able to track include:

  • Click-through tracking: You can track the links your customers click and where they go while in your email or website so you can see which parts of your email are effective and improve your marketing strategies.
  • Ability to compare message reports: Comparing reports between different messages you’ve sent will help you find marketing trends and patterns. Based on the reports, you will be able to improve and adjust future marketing campaigns.
  • Social media integration: Many email marketing services allow you and your subscribers to share your newsletters on your social networking profiles such as Twitter and Facebook.

Some other standard features include: Ability to track number of opened emails, forwarded emails, or bounced emails, ability to view which contacts have unsubscribed and whether the email was delivered or undeliverable, and the ability to export or download reports.

Below is a list of some of the popular email marketing tools currently available:

Social Media Analytics

How do you measure the success of a social media campaign? Below is a list of some commons types of metrics you can track relating to your social media channels. Tracking these metrics will give you tangible evidence that people are engaging with your business online.

  • Total Mentions (Brand Buzz): This is the standard of social media monitoring metrics—how many times you were mentioned in social media this week, month, quarter, etc. This statistic is a good baseline to help you understand how much or how little consumers are mentioning you.
  • Reach (Fan Growth and Activity): In social media, your fan base, also known as reach, is important. The larger your reach, the more people will see your content, spread your messages, and therefore increase your ROI. If you’re not attracting new followers as time goes on, evaluate your content and appeal.
  • Likes and Retweets: For many brands, the number of Likes on their Facebook page can be good indicators of appropriateness of content and techniques, as well as progress towards other objectives. On Twitter, count retweets instead of followers, since retweeting indicates a higher level of engagement and interest than simply following does.
  • Traffic and Website Clickthrough Rates: Track what type of content or media makes your fans click through to your website. Look at your website/blog’s referral sources to determine how many visitors came from social media sites. Monitor this number over time and look for improvements.
  • Conversion Rate: What is the visit-to-lead conversion rate of your social media traffic? In other words, of the social media traffic you’re generating, what percentage of those visitors become leads?
  • Your Activity and Outcomes: If you are a proactive social media participant publishing, promoting, engaging with and helping consumers online, then tracking your activity and the outcomes of those efforts is critical.

Below are some analytics tools you can use to track usage of your social media channels. Hootsuite includes a built-in reporting template or allows the option of creating one from scratch. SocialBro is another popular Twitter analytics tool.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing your business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. In the process of benchmarking, you identify the best companies in your industry, or in another industry where similar processes exist, and compare the results and processes of those studied to your own results and processes.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when first benchmarking is that they limit their benchmarking activity to their own industry. It’s important to look at other industries that may perform a similar process but may have to perform this process extremely well in order to succeed.

In relation to web, email and social media analytics, below are a few resources you can use to compare your company with others, both in your industry and in other industries:

  • Google Benchmarking: This feature, which you can access included within Google Analytics, is a statistical analysis report comparing the data gathered from hundreds of thousands of sites that have opted-in to anonymous data sharing with the same data gathered a year ago during the same monthly period. Site metrics include pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate, and breaks these down by geography, by traffic sources, goal conversion rates, and operating systems. Google provides this information to its users through a monthly newsletter.
  • MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report: The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is the latest iteration of MarketingSherpa’s annual benchmark guide for email marketers, with 194 pages and over 170 charts and tables. This one includes data from a survey of over 2,700 marketers. The link above goes to a free 16-page extract of the report.
  • The Social Media Benchmark:This is a study that’s performed every six months exploring how marketers are adapting to, investing in and getting value from social media. The Social Media Benchmark wave one infographic is publicly available at no cost.

Summary

Tracking analytics for your web, email and social media marketing efforts can seem intimidating, but if you take it slow, your efforts can pay off with increased business and a better understanding of your customers.

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