5 ways to use your web site analytics as a business tool

Last week I had a flashback to my early days as an amateur web site designer in the mid-1990s. Back then, we learned our craft by using some practices which seem laughable today. One of these practices – and you are permitted to giggle here – was actually writing a $3 check and sending it off every month in the mail to pay for a visible site hits counter. You remember the kind – the one that looked like a car’s odometer? Not only did it look cool, but it told you which city, state, and country the hits were coming from!

Times and technology have changed, and both visible hit counters and written cheques are now quaint bits of nostalgia. But one antique web tradition lives on. Even today, too many web site owners regard their web site’s analytics as nothing more than that visible odometer – a numerical measure of how many hits the site is getting and what geographical areas people are visiting from. And that’s a real shame. Because not only do web analytics offer a treasure trove of visitor demographics: they also act as a critical source of business data and insight.

Here are five ways you can use the data provided by your web sites analytics to improve your business.

1. Pre-qualifying prospective clients

Your web analytics can tell you which prospects have done their homework on you and which ones are just fishing.  You can even learn how to spot a good prospect before they contact you: they will find you through an intelligent keyword search, study your service description and ‘about’ pages carefully, bounce out to your social networking profiles, and then bounce back to your site. They might repeat the process over a few days or even weeks before finally getting in touch. And you can reply in confidence knowing that they are serious about their work and know what they want from you.

On the other hand, you might spot a stat like this: someone who has spent a total of 53 seconds watching my home page portfolio slideshow before sending an email asking for the sort of project my business just does not handle.

Over the years, I have observed a remarkable commonality in failed proposals: the prospective client firm spent fewer than 120 seconds on my own web site. It’s the sign of a business which has a preferred firm in mind but needs to get two or three more proposals and quotes for the procurement process. The time a prospective client spends visiting your web site is in direct proportion to your business’s chances of winning the proposal.

Similarly, it can be useful to pull up your analytics after a prospect has phoned you. If they have gotten in touch blind, and did not look at your web site before or after the call, you know that they are a prospect not worth spending much time on.

2. Spotting trends in your clients’ sites

If you have provided a service for a client and have publicised it on your own web site, you may find yourself appearing in search engine queries for their own business. This can help you understand what people are looking for when they want to find your clients – and in turn, gives you real-time knowledge of your customers’ needs.

3. Spotting who might be copying your content

Your web site is going to be plagarised. That’s a fact. From time to time, though, you’ll find a real genius who has copied your web site lock, stock, and barrel – including your analytics code.

There’s always one.

4. Spotting truthiness in advertising

You will be contacted every day with offers for business deals and services from potential service providers. Again, your web site analytics act as a form of prequalification for those you would pay money to rather than take money from. Here you can see that my business is the 100th search engine result for an area where I do not live, and they still contacted me in any case. How desperate!

5. Spotting risks to your reputation

One day your analytics tell you that your site is being scrutinised by someone at the local broadsheet newspaper – good analytics, after all, show the company name the IP is registered with. They came to your site via one of your client’s sites, and they seem very interested in the work you did for them. You think, “hmm, that’s odd.” The client then emails you at 11:45 PM asking you to remove their phone number and address from their web site, but they won’t explain why. You shrug and comply with some bemusement, as your client has obviously never heard of Google Cache. The next day, you open up the newspaper and guess who is the subject of a less than flattering investigative report?

Yes, this really happened. In this case, my web site analytics acted as an early warning system that my business reputation was at risk by association with an unethical client. Unethical ex-client, that is.

How do you use your web site analytics as a business tool? Can you think of ways that your web stats have made the key difference in a business decision?

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