Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
eReplacementParts.com
Website
http://www.ereplacementparts.com
Profile
eReplacementParts.com is a fast growing online merchant specializing in selling power tool parts and machinery parts. Current product lines include Black & Decker, Bosch, Delta, Dewalt, Makita, Milwaukee, Porter-Cable, and Skil power tools. Current inventory includes replacement parts such as switches, cords, and motors.
Analyzing Your Website Traffic with Google
Lots of companies have websites these days. Your company probably has one. These commercial websites have lots of functions, and they can range from simple information sites about a company to ones more like ours, which are full e-commerce sites that sell products online. No matter what the primary function of the website is, it’s important to know your customers and know how effective your website is.
We’ve been using a very cool product from Google called Google Analytics which provides lots of tools for checking website performance. There’s a lot more to website traffic than counting hits. Google analytics tells us how many of our visitors are first time customers, and how many are returning customers. We can check which days of the week are busiest on our site, and which sections of the site are most effective. Other convenient features check which browsers our customers tend to use and what screen resolutions they’re seeing. If you’re wondering how customers are getting to your website, Google Analytics can see if they’re visiting from search engine results, direct URL, or other sources. You can also compress or stretch the analysis timeframe to see how your website is progressing in the long run.
One of the newer sections of our website sells Milwaukee Tool Parts and we were able to track and analyze the traffic to the page right away. Conversion rates, which show the percentage of visitors that actually place an order online, are important to keep an eye on and we’re able to check how effectively this new section of the website can sell tool parts to customers.
It’s a pretty simple thing, but Google Analytics has provided us with lots of very important information regarding our business online. I would recommend it to any business owner who is serious about their online presence.
Persistence is Key
Truthfully, I’m not an expert on anything. I don’t even pretend to know much about business and it’s all a constant learning process for me. More often than not, I learn by messing up or by doing something wrong or perhaps by being too aggressive or too cautious. The experts should explain all the really smart technical stuff because they know better than me. But one thing I know all about is persistence.
If you’re a small business owner then you already know that business will never get off the ground without some serious hard work on your own part. We’re definitely no exception. When all of us here at eReplacementParts.com decided to become a tool parts distributor a long road opened up before us. There was, and still is, a lot of work to do. And it wasn’t one day’s work. Our work, and I suspect the work of most small businesses, is a long marathon and the only thing that keeps our company going is pure persistence.
There are always the bad days too. You know the ones. They are the days when you seriously consider closing up the doors. As we make more progress and as we grow those days get more infrequent but they still happen. Maybe a supplier hurts your business or a large customer leaves you. Maybe three employees decide to quit within one month and force you to take on all their responsibilities while you frantically interview people to replace them. Things can get really awful. For me, it all comes down to persistence, persistence, persistence. Every business owner has a vision of what their company can become. We all have grand dreams and it takes hard work each day to keep moving.
So that’s my pep talk. I have to hear it too. The endurance race continues. Well, I’m off to work…
Business ESP
You can’t communicate with employees through ESP no matter how hard you try. And I’m not kidding. Sometimes we act like everyone should just be able to figure out what we’re thinking, and it happens all the time. If Ideas and requests aren’t properly communicated they’re not going to be understood.
I had an employee who was rolling into work late, sometimes an hour late or more. I would stew about it. It would frustrate me and I just didn’t know why it was happening. Turns out, after I decided to lay down the law about it, that he actually didn’t know when work formally started because no one had ever told him. Thinking back on it, I know I didn’t say anything about a specific clock-in time and no one else had mentioned it either. Wow. I made a big mistake by thinking that an employee could somehow get inside my brain and know what I was thinking. And this doesn’t just happen with employees. It happens with business partners, suppliers, customers, and just about everyone else I encounter during a business day.
Of course communication is the missing piece here. Things have to be spelled out. It’s not because people are dumb or inept or anything like that. It’s because everybody is different and they all have different perspectives and ideas. It’s immensely helpful to sit down with someone, no matter who they are, and simply communicate. Maybe you’re better about this than I am, but I find that there is a constant need for more complete and basically better communication.
This goes the other way too. Sometimes people aren’t communicating their ideas to me. Maybe they don’t want to say something critical to their boss or maybe I’m simply not listening as I should be. It’s vital as a business owner, I think, to ask people what they’re thinking. I mean really ask, and be specific. Bad communication is a big roadblock to successful business and it takes constant attention to always maintain proper communication.
Tracking Performance
It is always important for us to track performance regardless of the task. We watch overall gross income performance, profit and loss, inventory costs, expenses, and all sorts of other performance indicators. We also watch job performance. We track tasks like phone orders taken per person, number of customer service emails sent, and number of web site updates made. It’s extremely useful to know what jobs are being done and how efficiently they’re being performed.
There are drawbacks to all this tracking though, and I didn’t understand much of it at first. I’m still learning too, but I’ll mention a couple of lessons that I learned here. For instance, I had to learn to really analyze the numbers to get the whole story. We started tracking our shipping workers’ numbers so that we would know how many packages they ship out per day per person. Sometimes a shipping worker’s numbers would be far lower one day. They might have been taking inventory or working on something still important, but not related to the single number we were watching. It was a problem. We’ve since learned to judge performance based on a number of factors, not just one.
Another issue with performance tracking is deciding how much information to provide to employees. The whole objective is to improve performance by tracking it, not to create contests or destroy quality in a wild dash for higher numbers. I’ve found that it’s best to track and privately review performance with employees instead of having the performance numbers sitting out there for all to see. We’re also trying to avoid the phenomenon where an employee hits their usual satisfactory target number and then slows down for the rest of the day.
It’s difficult to know what performance benchmarks to track and how. Every company is different and I won’t assume that your company works just like mine. I do think that performance tracking is valuable and necessary, but figuring out how is completely up to you.
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