Analytical Tools for Small Businesses

Analytical tools are vital to a business, regardless of its size. At a time when consumer behavior towards marketing is influenced by online opinion, embracing digital technology is important. For small businesses in particular, understanding customer likes, wants, preferences and even online behavior can mean the difference between growth and stagnation.

Analytical tools can help you gauge customer opinion and preferences, as well as assist you in making educated decisions regarding promotional and marketing efforts. Ideally, your analytical tool should enable:

• Analysis and improved real time customer experience of your website and online services
• Analysis and key reported data on your company as well as that of your competitors
• Dissemination of information that can aide decision making regarding both online and offline promotional efforts for your business

Following are some basic analytical tools that can help you learn more about your customers and your competitors.

1. Competitive analysis: These tools help monitor competitors’ behavior and actions. They to work by analyzing user clicks. Some tools, such as Compete, offer a paid service where you can track visitors to competitive websites. Competitive tools can assist with your marketing efforts in that you can keep abreast of how your competition is positioning themself.
2. Visitor Analysis: The Google Analytics tool is a simple tool and one that provides small businesses with statistics on the website’s users, background of the visitors including what brought them to your site, how they navigate your website, return visits, and frequency of visits. Yahoo web analytics is a similar tool.
3. Surveys and Qualitative tools: There are also tools that provide visitors with forms and other short surveys. These tools allow you to gauge the satisfaction levels of your site visitors. Surveys can be qualitative and help you map perceptions and associations as well. Social analytics tools like the Facebook Insights tool also provides you with data on user likes and counts. Twitalyzer is a similar tool – for analyzing user engagement on Twitter.
4. Test and experimentation: Did you ever wonder what part of your website is the most attractive to your visitors? There are web analytical tools that allow you to test different parts of your website. The principle behind the testing is simple: you test which segments of your website gather the maximum clicks and user attention.

This is just a sample array of the user-friendly tools that can be deployed by small businesses to better define their marketing activities. What you select is ultimately dependent on what you need from your web analytics tools.

Written by

Analytix Editorial Team