Reporting & Analytics
You’ve probably heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable (or Achievable), Realistic, and Time-bound. These are rigorously tested principles to what makes you likely to succeed in your goals.
When you set goals, whether personal or business, you have to find ways to measure your progress. To quote Bill Gates: “You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal.”
You might have set a general goal when you built your website – something like “bring more visitors.” Optimization Prime breaks down that goal and sets up ways to track the goal’s progress. That’s what reporting and analytics are all about.
What are Reporting and Analytics?
Although these two terms sound like they should be interchangeable, they’re not exactly the same.
Reporting: The process of monitoring how different marketing strategies for your website are performing.
Analytics: The process of exploring data to extract meaningful insights and improve performance of your website.
Common reporting and analytics tools are software provided by your web hosting company, Google Analytics, and subscription-based services like WebTrends and SiteCatalyst. There are tons more, but the important thing is what you do with the data you get.
Why do you need Reporting and Analytics?
Because you want to know how effective your marketing strategies are.
Whether your goals are getting more Likes on Facebook, bringing in more qualified leads, or getting repeat customers, you need some sort of a feedback that tells you what you’re doing is right or off track.
If you paid for pay per click (PPC) advertising, that’s some serious money and you better know how your keywords are performing. You need ways to track and understand how your visitors behave. This way, you can have targeted offers and solutions.
How can Optimization Prime help?
All this means lots of data. A typical busy person’s use of reporting and analytics goes something like this:
- Glancing over how many “hits” or “visits” a website is getting
- If there were any goals set, looking at the goals and their conversion rate
- Looking at the traffic source (Google? Facebook? Twitter?)
- Looking at the bounce rate (When and where visitors are leaving the website)
And that’s about it. There isn’t a whole lot of “analysis” going on here, because to be honest, this is too data-intensive.
When you work with us, we take out the headache. You’ll get an overview, a general idea if you will, of how your website and social media are performing, but we won’t bore you with all the details. Unless you want us to, of course.
After all, that’s how most CEOs roll. They don’t spend hours poring over data (that’s what the “numbers people” are for), because they have an actual business to run. Instead, they get what’s called a “dashboard” – a carefully selected collection of charts and tables, so they can always stay on top of key metrics related to specific goals.
At Optimization Prime, we will be your “numbers people.”
