Analyzing Analytics for Integrative Waves

Integrative Waves has finally established a web presence. Great, terrific, hallelujah, congratulations.....we did it! Being Thanksgiving day and all, we are very thankful for that! But is being thankful enough???

Well, appreciate the gratitude because it is good for our health. But we cannot rest on our laurels because now comes the REAL work to see if that web presence is worth anything to this business. Is it effective in any way to entice customers to learn more about Integrative Waves? Or are we just talking to ourselves?

How to do this? Well, along comes Google Analytics to help make it easier to assess this...

However, first we must determine what the goals are for our online presence. At present it is to build our audience and gain interest for our physical business.

This is a small business with a new web presence. Analytics, like anything else, can get overwhelming if everything is considered all at once. Google Analytics contains a lot of very useful tools but there is a learning curve that needs to be considered.

So Integrative Waves is curbing the enthusiasm and looking at only a few at first.

Which analytics would be the most useful properties to monitor?
We decided on:

• Audience Data and Reporting - this will allow us to discover our audience - from who they are to where they are coming from, whether and how they like the content, and how engaged they are. We need to know whether we are pleasing anyone and what is pleasing them? How did they discover us and do they want to return?
• Flow Visualization - to monitor how visitors moved through the website - which pages did they visit before they left. This will help us refine the pages that are of low interest and improve the content.
• Social Media Reports - Integrative Waves needs to know how social media is affecting our business - do we need to modify some of our goals? We have a social media presence. This data that integrates web and social media will give us a full picture of our content and community
• Traffic Sources - we need to know how are people finding our site. Are they coming through direct referral, organic keyword search or some other way?

The web presence of Integrative Waves is small right now. If we are smart, we will learn to use the many useful tools that Google Analytics offers. This will allow us to grow in the direction that will provide the best service and fulfill the needs and wants of our audience.

One step and one analytical tool at a time.....