Analytics, performance and even vanity metrics all come together with monthly reporting.
You’ve got your website up and running, there’s an online store selling product, you’ve got a couple of social media channels and you’re regularly contacting your customer base via email newsletters and updates. That’s pretty much it, right?
For a lot of business owners, yes. Once everything is established, they feel relieved at this level of accomplishment and think ‘ahhh… now I can relax‘. But that’s not quite the end of it. There’s one last piece to the puzzle…
Reporting.
Think about it for a second – you do reports on all your business financials – profit and loss, creditors, debtors, tax, superannuation. You do reports on other aspects of the business such as stock inventory, or how many sales you made, but what about the online side of your business? You’ve invested time and money into establishing your business presence online – you should keep track of how all of that is performing.
This is where reporting comes in.
Reporting. Analytics. Metrics. Engagement. Traffic. These are all terms that interconnect with each other in the digital space.
One of the more important pieces of data for a business is traffic. This refers mainly to your website / online store. This helps you to identify how people are coming to your website, and how long they stay there.
Carol, runs her own hand-made scarf business. She regularly posts images on Instagram, she runs an ad on Facebook, has a simple website and an online store to sell her scarves to buyers across Australia.
Monthly reporting shows that more people are coming to her online store from her Facebook ad via their mobile phones, and nobody seems to be clicking through from her Instagram posts to her website, or searching for her business on Google.
This tells Carol that her Facebook ad is the most popular way people are accessing her store, and she should continue to run her ad. It also shows there’s a huge disconnect between her Instagram and her website, and that’s an area that needs to be improved. Carol should also consider other strategies to increase her brand awareness so her business shows up in Google search results.
Without considering how people are interacting with your business online, you’re limiting yourself to the reach that you have and the potential growth for customers and sales. When you start to look more closely at how people interact with your business online, you get a better understanding of the content they prefer to look at, the time of the day they look at it, whether certain content prompts them to visit your website, and whether they’re following through with an online purchase.
Reviewing your online data is time consuming, but can give you highly-detailed insight that can help to improve your business and lead to increased sales. If you’re not currently reporting on your digital metrics regularly, it’s something that you really should be doing. If you find that you don’t have the time to do it, or don’t know where to start, WORK BY WILMS can take care of your reporting for you.
If you want some help with your reporting needs, get in touch and we can organise a time to talk about reporting for your business.