Modern businesses are fiercely competitive, and organizations are constantly trying to acquire relevant information that can help them focus their efforts.
Not only this, but analyzing your startup’s data properly can help you, as a business owner, come out with a comprehensive report when meeting with other entrepreneurs, stakeholders or investors.
You can use an online reporting software to gather information and, by showing how your startup fits into the whole market’s ecosystem, you will be able to achieve your business goals.
1) Why Do Analytics Matter for StartupsIJ
It’s difficult to be a successful entrepreneur, because the business world can be quite unstable – one moment you might think that everything is going well, but one second later, everything could turn around. luckily, entrepreneurs can rely on analytics to predict such situations, which allows them to take preemptive steps.
You might think that startup analytics are a complicated and highly technical affair, but the truth is that they are convenient and useful. Modern analytic tools are designed to be user-friendly, so anyone who uses them can catch on fairly quickly.
Analytics also boost the power of content marketing, which has become the central part of any digital marketing campaign. The first thing you need to know is that startup analytics have two essential elements:
2) What Can Businesses learn from AnalyticsIJ
There are several important things to be learned from analytics:
3) Starting With Web Analytics
At the founding stage of your startup, you will have little time and resources. There are countless things that you might find important at the beginning, but you can’t measure them. This is why you should turn to your website, the front door of your products and services, and measure its performance thanks to web analytics tools such as Matomo (formerly Piwik), a free open-source software tracking the visits and audience of your website(s) and producing reports. It is a free alternative to the famous Google Analytics, who also provides you with in-depth analysis of your website performance and user's behavior. Tracking your web analytics is extremely important if you have an online business, as start-ups often have, since everything that matters for your company happens online.
let's get started with Google Analytics. Set up a GA account by going to the official site and following the instructions. Then select a tracking method for your site, and choose from Classic Analytics or Universal Analytics. In the past, there were only Classic Analytics but a couple of years ago, Google added Universal Analytics with some different features.
Classic analytics has features such as remarketing, impression reporting, content experimenting and AdSense integration. On the other hand, Universal Analytics allows to track users from multiple browsers and devices, more custom variables, as well as tracking visitors without JavaScript and cookies.
It’s best to start with Classic Analytics and switch to Universal Analytics later when you have more advanced needs. Make sure that you get a tracking ID for metrics that can help you learn how many people come to your website each month and from where, as well as whether the same customers keep returning and how often.
Google Analytics is probably one of the best tools to start with, because it has user-friendly controls and is simple for beginners. Additionally, it doesn’t cost anything, so you will save valuable resources.
4) Track Key Actions on Your Website
Website performance is one thing, but user engagement is another – and Google Analytics lets you know about the latter too. You might want to assess how visitors interact with your website, ie. if they react and engage with your efforts on a particular page or banner. You might also wonder how far people are scrolling down your pages, or which call-to-action button works the best – the green one, the big one, the gif oneIJ
This is when the Event Tracking function comes in handy. Set up this function in your GA account to evaluate how different parts of website perform, but also when you want to do A/B testing. A best practice here is to think about what you want to measure and track beforehand, so that you immediately get results after launching your website and can quickly optimize it. Event tracking is a good way to increase your goal conversion rates.
5) Take Advantage of Modern Dashboarding
Once you have set up your web analytics accounts, tracked the events you want to assess, and gathered a lot of data from different sources, you will need to make sense of it by analyzing all your information. This is where dashboard software can help.
Indeed, they let you connect your various sources in a central point, which allows you to perform easily cross-database analyses, and thus get an even bigger picture of your activity. Carrying out data analysis is highly important for the understanding of your performance, and having the tools in hand to make sense of it through visualization is equally important. Dashboards give you an easy and immediate access to actionable analytics – the various KPIs you track – that directly affect the bottom line of your business.
6) Make Customer Surveys
Depending on how you create them, you can use online surveys to learn more about your customers or your potential customers. If you are surveying existing customers, ask them about your products or services, what they like about them, and why they chose your business over the competition.
When you want to survey potential customers, think about questions that will bring a lot of feedback you can work on to make better business decisions. See if your products are priced appropriately, determine whether your offers lack something, and find out what is missing with similar products or services, or how frequently people need such products or services.
Make sure that you repeat the same surveys a couple of times, and once you’ve gathered enough data, you can use analytics tools, find correlations and trends within all the feedback and extract meaningful conclusions. Before doing any survey, you must first determine your target audience.
Conclusion
Make sure that you build a data infrastructure for your startup as soon as possible and assemble an analytics framework. This is how you can monitor your business from day one and make the right decisions that will grow your business.
learn about analytics tools and see which ones can help your type of business the most. As your business expands, make sure to introduce mandatory reports through which you can learn how your organization is performing overall.