This is the critical question every start-up wants an answer to. In the olden days before the internet and mass production, it is easy to keep track of the profit you make just from seeing the number of people buying from your store or the amount of profit you make monthly. Now, almost everything is done through the net with no physical meeting or even an exchange of name. It can be really difficult when we don’t have something tangible to count or hold on to. Furthermore, with the introduction of social media, it is almost impossible to keep track on where your product, service or brand name has stretched to and how it ended out there.

There are few tools that you can use to help keep track of your business and also enhance your business in many ways.

First and foremost is Google Analytics (GA). GA is a tool that is helps users with the statistics of the business. It will provide you with reports on your audience’s demographics, traffic sources, content and conversions (rate of people entering the website and going through with the purchase/sign up). Under these reports are many more sub-headings which are worth looking at; especially the traffic sources from social media. To illustrate the use of GA, you would want to look at the number of visitors that enters your site. Then, compare it easily with either unique visitors or number of conversions or more. Check on goals that you made and see if they are met. Using your own professional judgement, you can tell if these are the kind of statistics that are you are expecting or not. Here's a picture of how GA looks like;

Moving on is the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). GWT also provided my Google is slightly different from GA. GA is aimed at providing you reports on a periodical basis while GWT gives less information but places more importance to how your website is working with Google. GWT allows users to boost their websites up Google rankings and have a stronger presence on searches. For example, under the sub-heading of content keywords you can find words that are searched most by Google users along with its percentages of them resulting in clicks to your site. What we want to do is to have the search queries to be almost same as the content keywords. And how GWT looks like;

To simplify, GA = Accountant and GWT = Web Technician.

The best part about GA and GWT is that it is totally free. These tools can prove invaluable to your business even though it takes time to both set up and allow for sufficient information to go through. There are also a few other tools like Lucky Orange, Open Web Analytics and Piwik.

All I have said is a very simple explanation of the tools so I greatly suggest you to get into it and discover its fullest potential!