Why you need to track your analytics to grow your business
BY BIG CAT CREATIVE
The numbers don’t lie.
I track my website analytics on the first of every month for the previous month. Not only is it super important to track, record and compare your analytics, it’s also really fun! Watching the numbers grow every month is always a good booster to get you motivated for the month ahead.
Recently I put up a story on Instagram talking about how I track my analytics, and I asked my audience if they tracked theirs, almost 90% of them answered no!
I was seriously shocked. Tracking my numbers once a month only takes about half an hour and is so beneficial to my biz, so I couldn’t understand why no one was doing it.
Maybe it’s daunting? It’s too hard? I get it, I’m not a numbers person either, but I promise, you don’t have to do any calculations. If anything it’s just a bit of copy and paste.
Maybe it takes too long? Well, I can guarantee you it doesn’t. Like I said above, it only takes me about half an hour per month!
Or maybe you just don’t understand why it’s so beneficial. Honestly, there are probably a million benefits, so, we'll keep it simple, and I'll tell you why I have found tracking a few basics stats to be so beneficial! (Hint: They will ALL help you grow your business!)
Popular Content: What do you audience like?
One of the most simple reasons why you should be tracking your website analytics is so you can get a better understanding of your audience and what they like. Once you know this, you can focus on how to serve them better.
If you notice that you have a really popular blog post, you should write more about that topic or in that category.
If you have a freebie that is being downloaded like crazy, you should make more freebies like that.
If you notice a lot of people exploring one page of your website, you should investigate further as to what they are finding there that is attracting them, and create more of that.
It’s simple. If you investigate your analytics you can see what’s performing well. This should give you a good idea of what your audience likes and what you create more of.
Traffic Sources: Where are they coming from?
This one is important to track every month because this shows me how my marketing strategies are working. Are your visitors coming from Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, your email list? Your analytics will tell you the number and percentage of audience that are coming from whatever social media or sales funnels you have setup.
This is important so you can measure if your marketing strategy is working, or not working.
For example, if you had been focused solely on stepping up your Instagram marketing game, but you haven’t had any more visitors from Instagram than previous months, it’s probably time to ditch that strategy.
If you didn’t check your analytics, you would never have known if your Instagram strategy was working or not!
If you don’t check your analytics, you really have no idea where your audience is coming from. Knowing where your peeps are coming from is one of the most important things to track, and could make or break your business.
Page views: How many people are coming to your site?
Once you know where they’re coming from, you should record (at least every month) how many people are visiting your site in total.
The main reason I check and record this is so I can make sure that it’s going up month to month. If it starts dropping, I then go back to my Traffic Sources and think about the strategies I’ve implemented this month, and why they could possibly be affecting the amount of traffic coming to my site.
This one is also just a great moral booster, because if you’re implementing a successful strategy, this number will be increasing every month - woohoo!
Geography: Where are they actually from?
This is another simple but important one. About 95% of my audience are located in the USA. I’m currently located in New Zealand, but because it’s about serving my audience, I type in US English, and my prices for my products and services are in USD. Simple, right?
Social Media
This one relates back to your Traffic Sources. In theory, the better your social media marketing strategy is doing, the more people should be coming to your website.
So, I track how many followers I have on each platform. Followers aren’t as important to me as my website analytics, but for the Social Media that I have a strong strategy implemented, I expect to see the followers rising month to month.
Email Marketing
Every month I record how many subscribers I have, and also the click and open rates of my emails.
Email lists are really important for growing your business, so this number needs to be climbing. And with your business growing, you expect that your subscribers will be increasing exponentially every month.
If you see that your subscribers are at a lull, you can change up your opt-ins. If your click and open rates are decreasing, you can reassess your email subject lines and content for the last month.
Motivation
This one is actually a biggie for me. I love checking my analytics every month and seeing my numbers rise, I actually wish I had started tracking everything earlier so I could see that, in fact, I started at a big fat ZERO!
It can be a bit disheartening when you see numbers dropping, but that’s why we check! At least we know that they’re dropping, we can figure out why and we can change our strategy.
Ok, so quick recap: Tracking your analytics is good for your business because it will help you serve your audience better, see which marketing strategies are working and which ones aren't, and motivate you to keep pushing forward (aka totally grow you biz!).
I record all of my analytics in a Google Spreadsheet (bleh, I know, I’m allergic to spreadsheets too). But seriously, all you have to do is create a column for each thing you want to record, and then a row for each month, then copy and paste all of your data into the little blank squares and voila!
Pull this spreadsheet out once once a month for half an hour, enter in your data for the month before, and check if your numbers and increasing or dropping, it’s really that simple!
I hope you are encouraged to start tracking your analytics and killing it at your biz ASAP!
Want more? Check out the business tips below! 👇
How to manage multiple social media accounts (with less stress!)
Social Media Metrics: The Basics! What is the bare minimum you should be tracking and why
How to create an organic Pinterest Marketing Strategy for your biz
How to leave Etsy and start a shop with Squarespace (and why you should!)
