Running an online business is tough. There always seems to be a lot to do. Your to-do lists might be running on for pages. There’s a lot to think about, money to spend, people to speak to and systems to set up. All on top of doing your job.

All those extra things on top of making products or offering services, that will help your business to grow, but aren’t how you dreamed of spending your time. When you first started to think about setting up your online business:

• You might have imagined yourself selling those products that you’d lovingly created, or chatting to clients about the work that they want you to undertake, and how you could give them what they want.

• You might not have pictured yourself looking at your website and social media analytics.

• You might not have dreamed about analyzing reams of data or looking for links in dips and peaks.

But, if you want to do well, these analytics are essentials. Here’s why.

To Make Sure You Are Doing it Right

To put it simply, without analytics and social media monitoring, you don’t know if your campaigns are being successful.

You don’t know if you are targeting the right people, if you are promoting your business in the right way, or if you are just wasting your time. Without the data, you could spend hours on a Pinterest marketing strategy, without knowing that only a very small percentage of your website views come from this source, or that while you are getting more views, it’s not converting into sales.

Analytics help you to see what’s working, and what’s not.

They help you to decide where to spend your time and money, by giving you a good idea of what’s worth it and what isn’t. 

To Help You To Set Goals

Setting goals is a key element of becoming successful. Your goals give you something to strive for, and a way to stay on track. They help you to monitor your progress and can give you a significant confidence boost when you need it. Having achievable and actionable goals can even help you to attract investment if you need it. It’s almost impossible to set realistic goals without first analyzing your data. 

Quick Decision Making

Most methods of tracking data are live. They offer you real-time information. You don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign to see how it’s done, or the end of the day to find out how a new post on your website is performing.

You can look whenever you need to. Data won’t be comprehensive until there’s enough of it to show patterns, but this real-time information can help you to make informed decisions quickly, which can be a great boost to your business. 

Increased Efficiency

Having easy to reach data and reports means that you aren’t wasting time making calculations, compiling your own reports and comparing the figures to previous periods. It’s easy, it’s in front of you when you need it, and it can easily be shared between your team. This can all increase office productivity massively. 

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