What are the most important stats to keep track of for a small business?

Online businesses have some of the best tools available to keep track of traffic, revenue and more. For a small business to succeed and grow, you need to understand what statistics to keep track of and which ones are less important. The majority of statistics come from three sources: Google Analytics, Google Search Console and AdWords.

Traffic

No matter if your primary means of marketing is through SEO, content or AdWords, it’s important to know as much as possible about the traffic coming to your website. Google analytics gives you a breakdown of where the traffic comes whether it’s organic Google, CPC or referrals from social media or other websites.

Traffic statistics are some of the most valuable. If you’re putting money into SEO and your Google organic traffic is stagnant or declining from month to month, then you might want to reconsider your strategy.

Companies that depends on local traffic such as restaurants can see what cities people are coming from. You may discover that most of your traffic isn’t even coming from your service area.

Revenue

Everyone is in business to make money and revenue information from Analytics and AdWords can help see if your efforts are making a difference. If you’re click through rate for your CPC is through the roof, but you’re not making money, then you might have a problem.

If traffic to your site is up, but your conversions and revenue isn’t then, you need to find out why your pages aren’t converting. Is it the type of traffic or is there a problem with your website?

Email Marketing Stats

Most email marketing providers have many important statistics available once the email campaign concludes. Email marketing is still one of the most power campaigns available and digging into these statistics can help future campaigns.

They can tell you what recipients read the email, how many clicked to your site, how many were returned and how many unsubscribed. Analytics doesn’t usually track email marketing and places it in the direct category, but you can manually tag the URLs in your email, so Analytics tracks it separately and it shows up in your traffic report. You may discover that your email marketing traffic was more than your CPC or vice versa.

Queries

One of the biggest aspects of SEO is a well-crafted keyword list. You spent a lot of time and money creating the lists and then implementing the SEO on your site. The problem is how do you what keywords work, and which ones don’t?

Search console can track your queries and let you know how many times you showed up in search results for that keyword as well as how many clicked through to your website. You may not only find out more information about your existing keyword list, but discover new keywords you may have missed.

Don’t underestimate the power of statistics to help streamline your business and marketing practices.