An entrepreneur’s guide to success through analytics

website analytics
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Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Hotjar as the most useful analytics programs – here’s how they can help make your business a success

Feel the failure and keep trying anyway

Expect to fail if you’re starting a business because failure can be the key to success. Every entrepreneur fails – every single one.

The trick is to get comfortable facing that failure to begin with, and then if you actually do fail, you just learn from it and get right back into the game ready to potentially face failure once again.

Oddly enough, successful people are the ones who fail the most. When you’re comfortable facing failure, you’re more likely to succeed.

Enhancing chances of success closely aligns with measuring your market so you know exactly what customers want – and perhaps, more importantly, what they don’t.

Online analytics tools may seem daunting but they are vital in finding out who your customers are, where they come from, what they do on your online channels and the results of those actions.

Track everything, not just your sales funnels. When you track everything you’ll find all sorts of information, like how many people are leaking and where they are leaking.

To many people analytics tools seem all too difficult. Some of them will present bit of a learning curve, but once you’ve got the hang of them, your business is guaranteed to benefit.

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Hotjar are the most useful analytics programs, and here’s some insight into how to best use them.

Google Analytics

It’s free and, when it’s properly setup, will give you just about every piece of data you’ll ever need. Google Analytics answers four key questions:

  1. who are my visitors? –age, location, and device
  2. where are my visitors coming from? – Facebook, paid ads, and search
  3. what actions are my visitors taking? – pages they visit and how long for
  4. what are the results of those actions – leads and sales

Set up goals in Google Analytics, they take just a few minutes to set up and will tell you ‘at-a-glance’ which traffic is working and which isn’t.

Google Tag Manager

This is the ultimate control panel for all things tracking. Tag Manager gives marketers much more granular control over what user actions are reported, and how they are reported. Plus, after the initial set-up, it doesn’t normally require any heavy developer involvement.

This will take some time to learn, but it’s an absolutely amazing tool that every business owner should be using. Once you understand what it’s capable of, it will unlock a whole new world of tracking capabilities for you. Once you have those, you’re better able to get answers to questions like ‘what’s working?’ and ‘what’s not?’.

Hotjar

Hotjar is the new kid on the block. This analytics tool helps you visualise what actions your users are taking, instead of trying to decipher those actions in rows of numbers and metrics. Tools like heatmaps to show where visitors are clicking, scrollmaps to see what parts of the pages they are skipping, sales-funnel tracking, and even how users fill out order-form fields are just some of the aids this ‘one-stop-shop’ offers businesses.

Chris Mercer, co-owner, Seriously Simple Marketing