We have always believed that a website can and should grow your business. But the only way to know if you’re growing is to know where you are. This regular column will focus on how to use website analytics to attract more qualified people to your website and how to better convert them into stakeholders: customers, partners, investors, employees, etc.

Smarter Online and Offline Spending

One of the great differentiators between Internet marketing and offline marketing is that everything is measurable. For this reason, all of your marketing efforts should be driving traffic to your website so you can track the effectiveness of your email campaigns, print, radio, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, etc, etc.  When you can calculate the ROI, you can make smart, informed decisions about your ad spending.

This is why it’s vitally important that you make web stats analysis a part of your regular routine.  But if you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of spare time to analyze stats. You need to spend less time analyzing and more time acting on the data.

The goal of this column is to turn you into a tweaker. No, not a meth addict—but someone who has the ability to look at web stats, quickly glean some insights, then hop onto your website and make small tweaks and edits to titles, headings, content, navigation, etc., to improve your statistics and ultimately the effectiveness of your website and your marketing campaigns.

Measuring Success

Once you get started, a common question is—are my stats any good? While Google Analytics now provides industry data to benchmark your website’s performance (we’ll discuss this in an upcoming column), there are so many factors that contribute to your stats that the best comparative measure is your own site.

Do you see improvement over last month or quarter? Did your actions have the desired result? If yes, great! If not, you learned something and you can tweak and measure again.

So stay tuned. Each issue we’ll look at a different metric and explain what it means, and more importantly how to use the information to make changes that will grow your website, and your business.

Note: This column uses Google Analytics as the reference software, but the analysis and actions apply regardless of the stats package you use. We like Google Analytics because it’s free, easy-to-use and it always has the latest and greatest tools.