analytics

Google Analytics Setup: Part 2 - Create Goals

Google Analytics Setup: Part 2 - Create Goals

Now that you know how to collect tracking information using Google Analytics, you can create goals to track whether your visitors are taking certain actions on your site. Setting up goals will give you the ability to easily determine the percentage of your visitors that sign up for your mailing list or make a purchase. To set up a goal within Google Analytics, follow the steps below.

Google Analytics Setup: Part 1 - Collect Tracking Information

Google Analytics Setup: Part 1 - Collect Tracking Information

Google Analytics is a powerful and comprehensive free(mium) tool that you can use to gain information about the visitors to your website. Using Google Analytics, you can determine demographic and geographic details about your customers, as well as their behavior on your site. Since there is a lot to learn about Google Analytics, we'll be doing a short series about the tool that includes more than one post. We'll show you how to get started and how to analyze some of the data that you collect for your site. The first post in our Google Analytics series will walk you through the basic setup process to collect tracking information for your website.

An Intro to Google Analytics and the Ecommerce Sales Equation

An Intro to Google Analytics and the Ecommerce Sales Equation

Google Analytics is a reporting tool that allows you to track your website visitors and their behavior on your site. You can use a different software to track this information, but it's important that you track it somehow. If you manage a large site with significant web traffic and more detailed ecommerce capabilities, you might want to look into an enterprise software like IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics) or Adobe's SiteCatalyst. For small business website data analysis, I like Google Analytics. It's easy to use and free if have an account with Google.

Set Goals and Create Business Projections

Set Goals and Create Business Projections

As you roll out your new products and services to the market, it will be helpful to set goals and create business projections (also called forecasts) your business. Setting achievable, research-based goals and forecasts will help you to project your business growth and determine your business needs over time. I like to create annual and 3-year forecasts. Many companies find value in 5-year forecasts, and that may be a good idea for you as well. I believe that with a small business things can change very quickly, so if you do plan to create 5-year, and often even 3-year forecasts, you should also be prepared to adjust them up or down as your business evolves. When you set your goals and create your forecast, you can either use a top-down approach where you forecast total sales and then assign percentages to each element of your marketing mix, or you can use a bottom-up approach where you forecast each individual element and add up those numbers to get your total. Either method works well, but if you want to dig into the details of your marketing, bottom-up forecasting is great for that.