Five Business Decisions Your Website Data Can Settle This Month

Analytics is worth nothing as a report. It is worth a lot as an answer to a decision you are about to make anyway.

Here are five decisions the data settles, and the number that settles each one.

1. Which town to advertise in

The location report shows where your visitors already are. Most small businesses discover they are being found in a neighbouring town they never target and ignored in the one they assume is theirs.

Advertise where interest already exists. It costs less to grow demand than to create it.

2. Which service to put on the homepage

Sort your pages by visits. The service page people go to most is your real lead product, whatever your brochure says.

Move it up. Put it in the navigation. Write more about it.

3. Whether the ads are working

Compare visitors from ads with visitors from search. Then compare what each group does. Paid visitors who arrive and leave immediately are a wasted budget, not an audience.

If search sends more visitors than ads do, your ad money must fill gaps. It must not carry the business.

4. Which page to rewrite next

Find the page with high traffic and no action. That page attracts the right people and then fails them. It is the highest-value rewrite on your site.

A page with no traffic and no action is not urgent. Nobody is being lost there.

5. When your season actually starts

Look at the same months across two or three years. Interest almost always rises before owners expect it, because people plan earlier than they buy.

Start your marketing when the searching starts, not when the buying starts.

Two rules for reading it

Judge months, not days. Daily numbers move for reasons that never matter.

Compare against the same month last year. Every seasonal business looks like it is collapsing in November if you compare it to July.

Set the goals or none of this works

Traffic alone answers none of these questions. You need events recorded for the things that matter: a submitted form, a clicked phone number, a completed order.

I set up analytics properly and go through the numbers with clients every month. Email jon@delcaromedia.com.