ANALYTICS

Analytics is looking for meaningful patterns of data and then making decisions.   The first step is to create an analytic strategy with goals and an outline of steps.  The next thing to do is execute your steps with the critical task of recording the data that will help you answer your questions.  Finally, you can review that data and see what decisions you can do to improve your business.

This presentation look at analytics for small business. Our agenda for the presentation is first to discuss what is analytics, then look at some examples, talk about strategy and finish up with specific methods.

What are analytics?

So, what are analytics? Per Wikipedia analytics are the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful, meaningful patterns in data and the process of buying those patterns toward effective decision making. So to kind of break that apart. Analytics, sometimes is a term that we just use as the broad spectrum. All this is analytics, but actually, it’s more about looking for these meaningful patterns of data. So first, of course, we need to have the data which is the discovery part. Then we look at the patterns which is the interpretation part. Then we actually show those and reports which again, are sometimes what people to say, well, that’s analytics. But really, it’s looking for patterns and all of this so we can actually make effective decisions based on this.

So the first part is again, recording this data. And there’s many places within your business operations that you may have data that you want to chord record. This could be in your marketing processes, or leads, processes, the sales process and the actual operations of your business. The key here to use analytics is to look for relationships between these different data points.

After you looked at those relationships, you can create reports from that information. These could be in the form of spreadsheets, but they could also get larger where all the data is put into databases, which are then looked at for the relationships. But many times this overwhelms people. So the concept of dashboards comes to play which are more of executive overview Have the information. But the key is to look at all of these reports to help you make your business decisions.

Examples

So let’s look at some analytic examples. So in the aspect of your marketing processes, there could be places where you want to record data in your website. This could be in the form of visitors. Your paid advertising that you may be doing this can be in a form of different metrics that may be included within your Google ad or your Facebook ads campaigns. If you do business listings, these could be referral sources where people find your information and come to your website and kick off. Your sales process can also be on specific reviews websites like Yelp, which may cause traffic to occur there in the sense that they may find a Yelp deal and buy it or they may again, want more information and come to your website. Next again, there could be some specific places within your leads process that you would want to look at for analytic analytics. These could be if you have a website forms that help to like say get a quote, can also be in a number of different ways that people may make phone calls to contact your business.

As moving further into your business operations, your actual sales systems could have places where analytics would want to be looked at and recorded the data. This could be in your actual sales process could be on different parts of the sales of your products or services. Or if you’re more of a service based business this could be in say the form of number of appointments and attributes about those appointments. Once you get into the operations of your business, if you’re doing products, this could be in the actual fulfillment, if you have to manufacturer could be in different aspects of inventory. And at the end, it could be in the customer service parts of your operations.

Analytics Strategy

So let’s talk about some strategy. First part to look at your analytic strategy is to actually identify the questions you want to have answered it again, just storing data for data’s sake doesn’t help. But if there are specific questions you’d like to look at, you can start your strategy for analytics by looking at the questions you want to identify, then you need to identify the processes by which the data should be recorded from. And depending on this, you may actually need to look at ways to actually record the data if you don’t already have information systems in place that are doing this already.

Once you started recording the data, you can start developing systems to show the relationships of these different data points. And then finally, you can start creating reports of the data.

Specific Methods

So let’s look at some specific methods related to analytics.

Google Analytics

If you have a website One of the easiest ways to actually start generating recording data is by a product called Google Analytics. It’s very straightforward. You create an account using a Google account, there’s a little piece of website code that you have to add to your website. And within it, you can actually create different things to help you understand if you’re accomplishing things. So for example, they have a concept of a goal that you can create, which is where a specific web page is fired in relationship to maybe a workflow process. The nice thing about Google Analytics is you can actually review the data within the Google Analytics account. And it also even has the ability to create dashboards. But again, this is related specifically to websites.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

If you’re doing paid ads using the Google Ads platform, they actually have a concept of what’s called conversion tracking. This is where an ad is clicked and then goes through a process typically on a website, but it could also be a phone call. That then would be counted as what they consider a conversion. The key to set this up is you actually have to add some code to your website specific on something like a thank you page. But the really interesting thing, and again, because this is a Google platform, you can actually integrate this back with your Google Analytics account, because again, a lot of this information actually occurs within your website.

Facebook Pixel

If on the other hand, you’re using Facebook, to do ads, there, they have a concept of what’s called the facebook pixel. This is actually created in another concept, which is a Facebook Business Manager account. The pixel is something you put on your website, and it actually then links back to your ad account that you’ve created in your Facebook manager account. The code that’s put on the website will fire when different actions occur and report that information back to Facebook so that information can be tracked along with different at the power of The facebook pixel is the ability to create a number of custom events. These events, when fired will provide additional data points you can put back into your Facebook Business Manager account.

Conclusions on Analytics

So it’s a wrap up some conclusions about analytics, there are a number of benefits of analytics. The first is, it’s very important to record all your data. And the reason why if you have the data, you can then analyze it. So it’s very important to record all that data. The other benefit is because you have this data, you can actually create a number of different reports and look at the data in different ways. But where analytics research shines when you look at all those data in the different reports, and you’ve had the relationships created between the data so the data doesn’t exist in isolation. And ultimately, the number one benefit of all analytics is to help you make business decisions based on the data based on the relationships and put into reports that you can actually look at and make those business decisions