If you decide to create a presence for your business on the web like a shop on a platform such as Amazon or Etsy or your own stand alone site, you'll be investing money and time to get this done. And, understandably, you'd want to see a return on that investment. What does that look like for you? Let's say you have a local clothing store, where you want to sell to people out of town. and not just local customers. That is a goal you can measure with your website.
To do that, you need to understand what steps people take in order to become your customers. This works online exactly like in a real life shop. First people need to find your store. Then they need to decide to enter it and look at the goods, and finally pick out something and pay for it. Once you have an online shop, you can measure these steps quite precisely. For example, if someone searches for t-shirts and a page from your site appears in search. That would be called an impression. This is the same as if a person in real life discovered you store exists. If that person decides to visit you site, they would click on the result link. By counting these clicks from search results to your website, you can measure visits. Once the person is on your site, they might browse around and look at various products. You can track their path across the website and see how long it took them to buy something, or maybe they left the site after clicking on a few pages.
You, or the person who maintains your site, can use a variety of tools to measure: queries, impressions, clicks, and the users path towards checkout. Most e-commerce platforms offer their own dashboards for tracking these metrics. Google provides two free tools: Search console and Google analytics that allow you to look up these metrics yourself. What are your goals? What do you want to measure? Once you decide that use your analytics tools and connect them to the metrics you have. The important thing is you can keep track of what's happening on your website, whether it is visitors, conversion rates, or revenue.
By following this information, you can make important adjustments and changes as needed. You can even gain insights on what your customers maybe interested in and expand your product catalog. Don't just let your website's metrics sit there! Use them, and make sure to watch the next episode in which we will discuss how to find someone to help you get on the web. ♪ (music) ♪.
