It always amazes me how much “free” information is available to us through Google Analytics and email subscribing services like MailChimp. Every month we can review exactly how many times our websites have been visited, which pages are being viewed the most, how many new viewers found us and how they located the site. And that is just scratching the surface on the data this program provides.

Newsletter subscribing services report how many of our newsletters were opened, how many times they were opened by the same person, how many times the links we used in the newsletters were clicked – they even rank subscribers to let us know how loyal they are.

Almost anything we want to know about the performance of our website or our e-newsletters can be gathered from these analytics. However, most small businesses do not take full advantage of this data. Although it is interesting to read results each month, it really doesn’t show us trends or patterns unless we record these analytics over time.

That’s why it is important to use a simple scorekeeping tool that records each month’s performance on the most key information. Doing so lets you see at a glance how each important category is trending. For example, when you add a new page to your website, are viewers increasingly looking at that new content or are they ignoring it? This kind of monthly scorekeeping helped my framing company grow one of the best marketing programs we ever implemented called Real Projects Real Stories. We devoted a page of our website to images of customers picking up their completed projects and the story behind why they had decided to invest in framing their memorabilia.