How to Be Proactive with Key Performance Indicators

While it's a great place to start when you’re first trying to put together a picture of your online presence, there’s far more to metrics than Google Analytics.

But, what, exactly, should you use Google Analytics for? And how do you figure out when you’re ready for the next level of web presence monitoring?

What Should A Company Use Google Analytics For?

While it’s not the end-all, be-all, you shouldn’t give up on Google Analytics just yet. Here are three important metrics you can keep an eye on using Google Analytics:

• Understand how your audience finds your website. Are your prospective customers using search engines to find your website, or are they clicking through from certain websites? Understanding how your prospective customers find your website will give you some basic insight into how much website traffic you're getting from online advertising (such as search engine advertising) versus "free" sources.
• Discover where your visitors are located. Google Analytics provides amazing details about which countries your users tend to visit from. How could this possibly be useful? Well, in the case of a company selling outside of the United States, you can find out your company's awareness level in different countries. Understanding where your audience lives can also give you insights into different customer personas, or different topics to cover on your company blog.
• Evaluate how users access your site. Another promising feature is that Google Analytics allows you to understand if visitors are accessing your website via mobile, tablet, or desktop computer. This is great information to have on hand when you are redesigning your website or determining the importance of making your website mobile friendly.

While Google Analytics is an incredibly useful tool, it's not going to help you report on ROI for your online advertising. The next level in web presence management is reporting ROI and revenue metrics that are important to your business and to your management.

The Next Step: Reporting on Key Performance Indicators

How your audience finds your website, where they live, and what technology they use are important parts of understanding your prospective clientele. But what will keep you in business is understanding your company’s goals and achieving them. And that’s where Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, come in.

KPIs are measurement goals that you set for your business – metrics you can use to directly determine your company’s performance against business objectives.

An example

If you wanted to find out how many customers visited your website in a given month, you could use Google Analytics and report that number. But how helpful is that information to your business?

Consider instead using a KPI, like the number of new business leads your website brings in over the course of a month, or the conversion rate, or percentage of visitors who become a new business opportunity.

Either of these KPIs have more of an impact on your business and speak to the effectiveness of your website in reaching your business goals.

The bottom line? KPIs provide valuable, actionable data that matter to the top managers at your company. Monitoring these can help you be more profitable and more successful.

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