Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

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.

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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…

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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.

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Learning to Give Responsibilities to Others

Being a (very) small business owner, I’ve experienced a trend over and over again that never seems to get easier: giving up responsibilities, duties, and decision making to employees.

When we started eReplacementParts.com every responsibility fell directly on the owner’s shoulders. We were in charge of building the site, writing all the content, taking all the orders, and shipping all the tool parts. Just from talking to other small business owners I know, it seems that lots of companies start this way. Perhaps yours did as well. Maybe it still operates that way.

For us right now, growth is our focus. We work hard to sell as many parts as we can and not be content with simply maintaining sales levels. As we grow, we need more people to make the company work and that means I have to give some, and then eventually most, of my responsibilities to others. To be honest, it’s tough to let go. Now we have entire departments dedicated to shipping our packages, taking customer phone calls, and building the website. When I walk through our building, I pass many people and their jobs used to be my job. I took a lot of pride in doing those jobs and it’s hard to really let go and trust that my employees will handle things as well as I did. And while they’re not clones of me, they’re able to handle their individual responsibilities just as well as I can and they’re far more specialized.

I think giving up responsibility is a tough thing for any business owner. For some small companies, the goal is to maintain size and perhaps the owner prefers to retain a large share of the load. That’s fine, but I believe that a small business will remain a small business as long as the owner is the primary worker. Potential is limited. If the goal is to grow, a business owner must give up some responsibilities to employees so that he/she can focus more on the company itself.

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It’s Hiring Time – Gathering Resumes

For me, going through the process of hiring new employees is fantastically frustrating. It’s a time consuming, uncertain, potentially expensive process. I suspect it’s the same for most small business owners. We would much rather spend our time growing and maintaining our businesses than dealing with things that, while important, keep us from our primary tasks. Even so, it’s time again to conduct another round of hiring here at eReplacementParts.com.

It’s always tough to get those resumes flowing in. There are lots and lots of companies out there that can help you find potential employees. In fact, the second you place any visible job ad they’ll come knocking at your door. While I’m sure their services are extremely helpful and convenient, we’re way too small to be able to pay fees of $5,000 or more per employee. It’s simply not an option, especially when we’re hiring entry level employees.

We’ve had pretty good luck using free or relatively inexpensive services to find employees. The first thing I always do when we need another employee is place a free ad on craigslist.org. If I place the ad in the morning, I’ll usually have ten or so resumes by the end of the day. It’s a great start. Also, lots of churches provide free services for connecting employers and job applicants. Try calling your local parish or synagogue. We’ve dabbled in newspaper classified ads with limited success but this can get expensive in a hurry. To be honest, I’ve found the very best way to find quality employees is through my own personal networking. I’m always sure to get the word out to friends and family that we’re hiring.

As our hiring process continues over the next few weeks I’ll make sure to keep this blog updated. I’ll talk a little more about checking references, interviewing, and making job offers. Stay tuned!

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Keeping an Eye on Profit and Loss

Before we had learned to keep track of our finances properly we made all kinds of missteps. There were small, relatively harmless mistakes like buying too much of a small inventory item, or buying an unnecessary computer. And then there were the big mistakes. Every one of these mistakes could have been avoided if we had only been keeping track of our finances the right way.

After we had been shipping our power tool parts for a year or so something became really obvious: DHL Ground was losing a lot less packages than US Mail was. Plus DHL gave us a tracking number and a guaranteed delivery schedule. I decided to drop US Mail altogether and have all of our packages shipped using DHL. This would have been perfectly all right but here’s where I made my big mistake. DHL cost more than US Mail, and I was so afraid that higher shipping charges would turn away customers that I decided to send everything DHL but charge the much lower US Mail rates. This meant forfeiting some profit on certain orders and taking an outright loss on others. I just figured that the profit from the orders would overall outweigh the losses from the shipping carrier.

Turns out I was wrong. To make things worse, we had no way to view our company’s profit and loss statements. We were completely winging it. If we had been carefully watching our costs and looking regularly at margins and the bottom line, we would have been alerted to the problem within a couple of weeks. Instead, we kept losing money for months and months without any idea of what was going on. It was a total disaster.

As soon as we were watching our numbers properly we quickly made some changes to our shipping. US Mail was reactivated as a shipping option and the DHL prices were raised to where they should have been. Like flipping a light switch, we were suddenly profitable that day and everything was fine. After that period of time we’ve watched our profits and losses very carefully. Use QuickBooks or whatever program you prefer for your accounting and stick to it. I won’t ignore accounting as a business owner, and we handle our own books. For us, it’s the only way to keep our heads above water.

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Meet eReplacement Parts

Hello there! Allow me to introduce myself and to tell you a little about my company, eReplacementParts.com.
My name is Mike, and together with my business partner Dave, we started our online business with basically no money and with no real understanding of how to build a website. For a time, it was literally running out of a living room. Four years later, we’re a prominent online merchant selling power tool and machinery parts. I had worked in power tool sales and repair for several years before we started eReplacementParts.com, so I had a decent understanding of tool parts and tool operation. I had also worked as the (very unskilled) web developer for another online store which sold house wares. Through these two previous work experiences, I discovered that it was very feasible to make money selling products on the internet, and that I had a good product that could move.
Everything related to our company has been a huge learning experience. We’re constantly faced with problems and situations that require solutions, and if we didn’t have an answer or the know-how to solve those problems, we had to learn. It’s simple as that. Running a business is about being prepared and willing to meet challenges. That’s what this blog will focus on: challenges that we’ve faced and continue to face, and how we have responded.
Right now we’re currently employing about 15 people, with managers, programmers, bookkeepers, shippers and others. Our inventory is very complicated and very organized. We maintain a very secure and useable website that lives inside two powerful computers. We have many future goals that keep us moving forward and keep us focused. All of this and more comprises eReplacementParts.com, and as always, it’s still a work in progress.
Dave and I will be updating this blog weekly, so come back often, and hopefully we’ll provide information that will be helpful with your own small business.

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