How many small business owners do you know have a website, but have no analytics installed? Please raise your hand:) I know many! And it really is sad. I have talked to many small business owners and they are starting to figure out that they need to have analytics for their website. Some even have it but, don’t know what the data means.

Over the past 2 months I developed a report for small business owners. It is something they can quickly look at and see the trends of the month. For small clients, I am also adding in social media data that they are finding really useful. I love talking to a client about a trend I see on their website and see them truly understand what it means. It’s really a great feeling.

What are the five most important things I like clients to understand (these are just a few of the important ones):

1. Bounce Rate – Many clients think the higher the bounce rate, the better! No, no – a higher bounce rate means people are not finding what they came there for. We need to figure out how to reduce that number.

Example of Bounce Rate

2. Overall Traffic – Where is your traffic coming from – Referring Traffic, Search Engines, and Direct Traffic? Very important. Good example – I had a client that I’m working with, she had a large spike in traffic. Most of the traffic was Direct Traffic. After doing some research with her, we figured out that the traffic was due to a coupon that she sent out. There was no landing page for this coupon, just going to the home page. But that helped us narrow down the traffic.

Traffic Sources example

3. Keywords – I love looking at this. Anybody that knows me, knows I love analytics, but keywords are probably my favorite area. This is the area where we can figure out the top keywords, how long people are staying on your website, where they are going on your website, bounce rate for that keyword and so much more.

4. Content Overview – This is another very powerful feature of analytics. Where are users going on your website, what are the most popular areas and least popular? This is the second area where I spend my time. So much powerful information here.

5. Map Overview – See where users are coming from. One of my clients was using another analytics package (not Google Analytics). I looked over the data and was very disappointed with this application. It didn’t have any of the many great features of GA including the power to find out what towns / cities people are coming from. It was only able to tell me X number of users came from NY… nothing else then that. Not really helpful? For a small business owner, he needed to know what were the most popular towns of NY. He has a bill board in the city, which was driving some traffic to his website, but many of the towns that he does some advertising in where actually bringing in more qualified traffic. He just signed a 1 year contract with me last week because information like this, he loves and it proves the power of analytics.

Example of Geographic Information

Those are my top 5 picks. I know many of my friends that read this, will have other top 5′s. Let’s hear them. It’s always great to hear from you guys so let’s hear it.

** New update to Google Analytics, now you’re able to add up to 20 goals! How sweet is that? Thanks to my friend, Wendy (@socialpmchick) for the information. What would you do with 20 goals now?

As you know, this blog is fairly new, so I’ve been trying a variety of social media tools to promote my new postings. I’ve talked to a few friends and it’s interesting to see what works for them and what may work differently for me. Luckily, with my experience and background in web analytics, I can see almost immediately what’s working when I promote my blog postings on Twitter, LinkedIn and sometimes Facebook.

From my experience and what I’ve seen through Google Analytics tracking, I’ve noticed that when I tweet about my new topic or one of my friends tweets about my posting, I’ll see a jump in traffic of 10 to 20 visitors for that hour. It usually dies off after the initial post, so I would either have to do another tweet or someone else would have to re-tweet my information. Of course that gets a little annoying if I just re-tweet my blog info all the time, so I try and avoid that situation. On LinkedIn, I will usually post something on my status and may post something on one of the groups that I’m in. I usually do this in the morning and then use Twitter later in the day (afternoon) or sometimes the next day.

I was looking at my stats for this past week and it’s interesting to see the comparisons. Besides direct traffic at 43%, traffic from LinkedIn is at 29% and from Twitter it’s at 12% for the week. Right now, my feeling is that I am getting more “quality traffic” from LinkedIN as most of the people I know there are leaving great comments and sending me feedback via email. Most of these friends & connects are then tweeting this information with friends via Twitter which is awesome to see. Hopefully my blog audience will continue to grow. Hint, hint – so tell your friends and co-workers… haha!

What is your experience been promoting your blog or business? Similar experiences or like my friends, totally the opposite? What is working well for you?