by Melissa Burns
Do you remember the old adage? If you don’t measure your activities, you simply cannot manage them.
Several years ago when I was working for a large software company one of the senior executives asked me to revisit the project we were working on and to measure its success. I realized that the most important thing was not only to assess the performance and profitability but also to understand which metrics would be the best fit for our goals.
In this article, I share three awesome tools for tracking the success of new business activities and measuring your ROI. Although every business is unique, the tools listed below are quite universal for many businesses.
3 Recommendations for tracking your business success:
Tag Management
For me, Tag Management is really something you should install if you want to add analytics and conversion tracking to your site. I realized that Google Tag Manager helps control the data quality and the enrichment of this data from time to time. In digital analytics processes, the measurement part is important because you have to make sure that you have clean and consistent data to analyze and then draw insights from. If you don’t have this system available, then it might make the job of web analyst much harder. Here is more information on tag management and tag management systems.
Survey Tools
Online Surveys are a different way to measure data that you can get from Google Analytics since surveys give you a fast insight into the mind of your customer or a user who visits your website. For example, being able to survey your newsletter subscribers programmatically can make a big difference in understanding your customers or site users. Google Surveys is one of many online survey platforms available.
Google Analytics
Gathering data is not enough as you also need to store it somewhere and then analyze it. That’s why with the help of Google Analytics you can do all this and even more depending on a business or a website you want to track. Google analytics is a universal tool that can help you to find out which online campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions, get the information about the location of your best visitors, visualize the clicks on your site and a lot more. Though this tool is extremely useful, it operates professional terms that might be unfamiliar to the average users, so before diving into analytics I would recommend going through the terms Google Analytics uses.
According to the research conducted by Cardinal Path, Google Analytics maintains the number one position among other analytical tools and has 370 implementations (74% of retailers), whereas it’s the biggest competitor Adobe Analytics has 206 implementations (41% of the retailers).
How to Track ROI Using Google Analytics
The first thing you would want to do is look at the traffic that is coming to your website. Are you getting organic traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic, or direct traffic, which means that someone is specifically typing in your URL? Knowing this information will help you to understand which data you want to measure.
Landing Pages
So the first thing you may want to look at is landing pages. There is actually a section in Google Analytics that will show you the types of places that people are showing up at. That is a very important piece of information to know where people are coming from and what they are looking for.
Visits
Another important metric to view visits. If many people are going to your site it means that they are interested in the content that you have and it means that they are finding what they need.
Average Visit Duration
There is a metric called a bounce rate and everybody wants to have it as low as possible. It means that a person immediately leaves your site without doing anything. So the main aim is to get the site duration as high as possible or at least between 2-3 minute range, which means that people are collecting the information that they need in order to make a possible buying decision.
Summing Up
When it comes to making changes in your business whether you are running an accounting firm or a consulting firm, it’s vital to have the right information at hand in order to make informed decisions. If you haven’t used the mentioned above tools yet, start considering these solutions as a part of your business.
image credit: google.com
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Melissa Burns is an education blogger, and a new teacher. Studying at Columbia University inspired her to dedicate her life to teaching. She is passionately interested in informatics, writing, and educational activism. Having visited 38 countries she is planning to travel around the globe. Follow her @melissaburns or contact at [email protected]