Business savvy entrepreneurs everywhere understand the importance of getting their business online. However, once there – many fail to measure the direct influence and impact that their online presence has on new business, customer loyalty and reputation.
There are several free tools and resources available to help you connect your online results with ROI. You can start measuring your online influence and impact across your website, social media and sales & revenues — all in a matter of minutes.
Website:
Company analytics:
If you haven’t already started using Google Analytics to monitor your website activity, follow these simple instructions to add it to your site now. Google Analytics is a free tool that will provide you with invaluable data around where your visitors are coming from and how they are engaging with your content.
Use this service to access and automate:
- Reports: Tailor weekly, daily or monthly reports for your specific needs – from number/demographics of web visitors and PPC ad performance, to website referrals, ecommerce and content trends.
- Dashboards: Design personalized dashboards with the analytics, visuals and comparisons that are valuable to you. Place your dashboard on your internal websites with customizable widgets or set up automated alerts to your company email.
- Promotions: Create google tracking codes for each link (to your website) you distribute externally. Distribution outlets could include social media, email, forums and more. Filter results of each promotional campaign within google analytics (Traffic Sources >> Sources >> Search >> Campaigns).
Competitor analytics:
Now that you have access to your Web site analytics, you’re probably wondering how you compare to your competitors. Compete.com is a great resource that allows you to benchmark your data against others in the marketplace. You can also use SimilarSites.com to find other information about competitor websites including keywords and rankings. After checking your site against competitors, you might find that your website doesn’t measure up quite as you hoped. The reason for this may be attributed to your website having a low SEO ranking on popular industry key words.
SEO Checker:
SEOCentro provides a quick “rank checker,” which allows you to identity where your website ranks on search results for specific keywords. The tool also lists those websites who rank above and below your website according to search term.
Stay tuned for our next two posts in this series – covering tips and tools to measure online influence and impact across the areas of Social media and Sales.