The Best Web 2.0 Tool for a Small Business Office
For a small business with an online presence playing a significant part in the revenue stream, web analytics are crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. And, for a small business running on a tight budget, Google Analytics 2.0 is the best solution for this task.
The exercise of web analytics for a small business with a significant online presence encompasses analysis of data from its website and its competitors' sites with the purpose of improving the online experience for customers. The tasks necessary to perform this analysis include measuring quantitative and qualitative data, focusing the measurements on the needs of your business, and to use the information delivered by a web analytics tool to keep improving the website (Cutroni, 2010, p. 1).
Google Analytics 2.0 provides a set of tools which look at website metrics. These include number of visits, number of unique visits, which pages are viewed and how much they are viewed, who stays on your site and who abandons the site. Important to the task of web analytics, Google Analytics allows tracking and setting specific goals that you define as outcomes important to your business. These goals and the capability of Google Analytics to track not just Adwords, but many other types of web marketing tools, makes it a powerful tool. Most importantly, it provides these services as a free application.
One of the most popular alternatives to Google Analytics is WebTrends. However, WebTrends is a solution many small businesses cannot afford, or should not buy. The goal of most, if not all small businesses is sales. If these sales are primarily online, then all you need to use is Google Analytics to track them. However, larger companies provide extended services beyond just online sales. In that case, WebTrends can better meet their needs (Delahaye Paine & Paarlberg, 2011, p. 88).
As a small business committed to improving sales and profits of their online business, there is no better and cost more cost effective tool to use for web analytics than Google Analytics 2.0.
References
Cutroni, J. (2010). Google Analytics. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Delahaye Paine, K. , & Paarlberg, W. T. (2011). Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
