A handful of Web analytics resources for small businesses - from free services to tutorials to products tailored to their needs - have come to market over the past several weeks. Each slightly different, they are part of a larger, ongoing trend: the mass marketing of analytics applications - a trend that is filtering down to the smallest companies now.
At the same time a knowledge base for these firms on the best way to use web analytics is growing.
New Products
At the end of May, comScore rolled out its "Start-up, Step-up" program to make its web analytics more price-friendly for new and small businesses. The service lets anyone install its tracking pixel for free - formerly it charged a substantial setup for its implementation, ReadWriteWeb says. Also sites with less than one million unique visitors per month can access the ComScore dashboard for free; sites that pull in between one and two million visitors per month can receive discounted pricing.
More Resources
Web Analytics Demystified recently launched a mentoring program that offers free assistance for nonprofits. The service is a way to provide training in web analytics to students and build up the industry’s base of analytics experts, says Eric Peterson, the consulting firm’s founder (via Internet Retailer). Launched on May 15, the Analysis Exchange has signed up more than 200 mentors, more than 250 students and more than 50 nonprofit organizations, he says.
One nonprofit participating in the program is Public Broadcasting System, which learned that 1) among social media sites, StumbleUpon is the biggest generator of web traffic to PBS.org, but that 2) while it was generating the most traffic from social media sites, it wasn’t sending visitors that were highly engaged with PBS.org. PBS also realized through the program that traffic from Facebook to PBS.org also had a low level of engagement - but its fan page on Facebook.com had a high level of activity. The project then gave PBS recommendations on how to build stronger engagement, Internet Retailer reports.
Finally, there is the joint initiative between Google and the SBA. Of all of these, it is the most basic - a series of tutorials for small businesses on how to use marketing and analytical tools.
Accumulated Wisdom
Small businesses are also the beneficiary of an accumulated store of industry knowledge on how to use these tools. For example, Online Marketing Blog advises small businesses to avoid setting as an object search rankings. Instead, it said, SMBs should first focus on KPIs to provide insight into organic search traffic.
“In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.” More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, and so on, the site advises - but goes on to advise SMBs not to be a “victim of KPI creep. Start simple and add more as you get comfortable.”
Some KPIs to follow, it suggested, include:
- Branded searches versus non-branded.
- Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios.
- Followers/fans in outposts.
- Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally.
- Number of shares of content across platforms.
