Understanding Analytics: What Every Small Business Should be Tracking
This blog article demystifies analytics for small business owners, offering a clear, practical guide to understanding and using data to drive smarter decisions. It highlights the importance of tracking key metrics such as website traffic, customer behaviour, and sales trends. The article also breaks down common analytics terms and offers actionable tips on setting goals and making data-driven improvements. Whether you're new to analytics or looking to refine your strategy, this guide helps small businesses turn numbers into meaningful action.
Most small businesses know they should be tracking analytics—but many don’t know where to start or what this actually means. Here, we outline three fundamental marketing metrics to track in a simple and comprehensive way, as well as discussing how we make this process easier at RODA. By focusing on a few key metrics, you can unlock the tools to platform your small business growth.
Social Media Engagement
The analytical features you might want to start regularly checking across your social media pages include the number of likes, shares, reposts or saves your post has received. Professional or Business accounts on social media sites allow you to go further, focusing on your engagement and retention rates, follower growth and clicks.
To improve your social media engagement, we recommend posting more frequently, keeping a close eye on the type of content that is currently trending, and running polls to increase interactions with you brand. At RODA, we can help you create engaging social media posts whilst combining creativity with detailed data-informed strategies to get the most out of your social media.
Website Tracking
When your website holds so much content, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed trying to keep track of it all. However, your website is your digital storefront, and the place where your audience will spend the most time browsing your products.
In terms of tracking, making sure you understand your average retention of monthly visitors is a solid place to start. Also, sourcing where your customers are coming from, whether it’s Google, social media or email can be very useful when deciding where to prioritise putting out the most content. This is something we can help with, working with you to figure out how you can increase retention rates using your analytical details, as well as improving your underperforming platforms. We can also help determine which marketing and ad strategies are directly contributing to sales and in which areas we can work to improve.
Email Open and Click Rates
Email marketing tends to be the hardest platform to gain consistency, with everybody’s inboxes already flooded with marketing emails from hundreds of different businesses. Finding a way to stand out can be pivotal in understanding the needs of your customers, and tracking email analytics is the first step to achieving this.
Finding the Open Rate (the amount of people who opened your email) and Click-Through Rate (percentage of people who clicked the link in your email) will give you an insight into whether or not your emails are landing with your customer base. We can help you track this information and organise it efficiently, using our knowledge to make your emails more engaging to encourage clicks and viewer retention.
Our key message is that you don’t need to track everything, just the right things and how to interpret those statistics. Analytics doesn’t have to be intimidating or overly technical. By regularly checking up on your numbers and acting on the outcomes, you can ensure development and growth for your small businesses. We can simplify this process and drive real results by helping you understand what your analytics actually mean, giving you helpful tips and the confidence to market your products effectively.
