We talked about using site metrics earlier, in a general manner. Here, I would like to provide some practical uses for site metrics to help you increase your sales.
“If you don’t have documentation, then it didn’t happen,” is what my boss used to say when I worked in a warehouse. What he meant was, if I didn’t have a receipt for every time a customer checked out a specific product, it would be essentially my word against his when it came time to report on inventory. I’d be out of a job and he’d be a few hundred bucks worth of merchandise richer.
The same thing applies to your on-line business. If you don’t have a paper trail (or electronic trail, as the case may be), you can’t prove anything. Did a customer visit your site three, five, or zero times? You don’t know unless you keep track with some kind of analytics/metric tracking program. The more detailed the program, the better.
The total number of visitors you get in a day, week, or month may look impressive on your annual report, but it usually won’t help you figure our things like: How many are repeat customers? How many pages did they visit? What days/times did they visit? These are things you need to know.
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