Does your private equity firm have a strong grasp of the goals, measures, and impact of your digital presence found through website analytics? Your website is more than a space for stakeholders to gain information. Almost as importantly, it is a source for learning about the behaviors and interests of your audience. If you are not using analytics to measure activity and integrate the data you find into your business strategy, we have 4 introductory ways for you to break in. 

Many of the private equity firms we work with don’t utilize these website analytics methods and it puts them at a decided competitive disadvantage.  Firms should rely on website analytics to get a deeper understanding of traffic and adjust their content and marketing strategies.

For firms ready to get more out of their analytics, the steps we’ll show you are simple and will help improve your website performance.  Here’s a close look at four ways your private equity firm should be using website analytics.

1. Apply Filters and Get Rid of Bots

Bots are a powerful technology that can be used to automate multiple processes online. Unfortunately, one of those processes is to ping other websites.

These bots can be a nuisance and clog up website analytics. Generally, when looking at traffic, you want to identify unique visitors … and you want to be sure that those visitors are real people.

Counting bots can lead to higher numbers, but that doesn’t give you a true and accurate look at your website and its performance. While numbers with bots removed will be lower, they can be entrusted and used to determine what actual humans are doing when they visit your firm’s site.

To ensure you’re dealing with real humans, apply filters at the website level that will exclude bots.

Google Analytics, for example, excludes known bots and spiders by default (it’s a toggle towards the bottom of the Settings cog). Google Analytics also lets you filter bots manually using customized filters.

2. Choose 3 Key Monthly Reports

Too many private equity firms have no idea what their true website traffic is.  Frequently, we’ll ask clients during a redesign project how many unique visitors are coming to their site, only to be met with blank stares.

It’s essential that key leaders in the firm can quickly get a handle on critical website metrics, starting with how many unique visitors there are to the site.

Getting a clear handle on your web traffic does not need to mean overly complex reporting. Instead, automate the distribution of key metrics each month with the delivery of three reports that reflect the following:

• Summary Report – A summary of the unique number of daily visitors to the site.
• Traffic Sources – See where traffic is originating from. Sources could be Google, another search engine, email, other websites, or others. (Again, this is a good reason to clean up those bots from your analytics.)
• Top Content – What areas of the website are driving the most traffic? Website analytics can contain much more detailed information – from how much time visitors spend on each page to bounce rates (the number of visitors who only go to a single page) to exit percentage, a measure of which pages on your site are the last that visitors go to before leaving. However, those granular levels of information are probably best left to the marketing and web teams for deeper dives into the numbers.

With a quick visual summary of these metrics, often in the form of a dashboard, key personnel can quickly get a baseline understanding of how the web is performing and the content that matters most to visitors.

Remember, analytics are a great source of information that allow you to learn, analyze, change approaches and take action. Key leaders may likely see things in the analytics that others will not. Their questions about the data provided can help gain a better collective understanding of what’s happening with the website.

3. Set Your Goals

What is it that you want visitors to do when they visit your website? Before you can fully gauge the efficacy of your firm’s website, you need to know why you’re measuring what you’re measuring.

It starts with determining what actions you want visitors to your website to take. From there, you can set goals around those actions.

We see a majority of private equity firms with no goals configured around their websites.

Goals are a critical way to measure conversions. While we recognize that websites for a private equity firm are not intended to be the hard-core lead-generation engines they are for other businesses, you still need to set these goals in order to measure certain conversion rates.

The actions you want visitors to take will be uniquely tailored to your firm’s needs, priorities and current campaigns. Some sample actions – and the possible resultant goals – are:

• How many visitors who visit your site on a mobile device click on a phone number and call you from it?
• How many visitors from any traffic source, or a specific source, are filling out a form?
• How many visitors to your site end up looking at portfolio companies or case studies?
• Whose bios are getting the most attention? This goal can be a chance to add a little humor to your website analytics. Our agency calls the bios-by-popularity numbers our “power rankings.” One warning – if you have office dogs, they’re going to win. Every. Single. Time.

4. Know Who Is Visiting

You’ll want to know which companies are visiting your site and the best way to do so is to set up automated emails that indicate who is visiting. About 15 percent to 20 percent of visitors can be directly identified, so email push notifications are an ideal way to see who they are and take fast action in responding.

Google Analytics can accomplish this, but if your firm is using a marketing automation platform such as HubSpot, Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), or Marketo, this can be easily configured. Another inexpensive option is Leadfeeder.

Analytics are a vital tool for any private equity firm seeking to understand what’s working and what can be improved on their websites.

Put these 4 tips to use and you should have a better understanding of what visitors are coming to your website for.  Please reach out with any questions as you begin to discover and learn the usefulness of web analytics.