“Everyone on the same page and on the same bus” – what a challenge in the fast paced environment we work in.
This week we held a session for our staff to look at the analytics provided by Google to ascertain the performance of our website. It was an interesting exercise. Getting beyond the anecdotal to actual data – what was sold, what is most popular, what always needs to be in stock. They found out how long people stayed, which pages customers spent more time on, what key words they used (most traffic is driven by our brand name) where visitors come from in the world and in Australia and what they want from us, which links work best, new and returning visitors, how many catalogues we send out, the number of quotes we do and much more fine detail. To see this data collated over a week, month, 3 month period or year certainly inspires new strategies.
We are also reading What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis not because we think Google is the world (although it probably is) but because applying the models of other businesses to your business can be very revealing. To stay relevant and successful in our type of business we need data input, ideas and questions.