With internet usage set to grow even faster in Papua New Guinea, a business’s online presence is going to be increasingly important. But how will you know you’re making an impact?

As a recent article on Social Media Today enumerates, the key things you need to measure if your business is active on the internet are:

1. People’s engagement with your online brand
2. Your online reach (how many people your business reaches and how)
3. Referrals from other sites to yours
4. Your ‘Share of Voice’ (your business’ share of the online conversations that matter)
5. Your online influence (how effective you are at getting people active online)

Fortunately, there are lots of tools, many of them low-cost or free, that can help you measure this.

The one essential tool for measuring your website’s performance is Google Analytics. Built to support Google’s online advertising business (which means Google is happy to give it away for nothing), Analytics offers more data about your website, who visits it and when than you could possibly need.

While its data can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it, setting your website up on Google Analytics is relatively straightforward: register with the service, add the simple line of HTML code Google supplies to each page on your website, and you’re ready to start measuring. No business website should be without it.

Did you know, for example, that the ABC’s Liam Fox is PNG’s number one tweeter, with over 4000 followers?

With 128,000 Papua New Guineans now using Facebook, a Facebook page is becoming an essential part of any consumer brand in PNG (active PNG brands on Facebook include Digicel PNG, GoGo Cola and Port Moresby’s trendy night spot, Club Illusion). If you have a Facebook page for your organisation, Facebook provides an Insights panel that provides some basic analysis of who is visiting your page.

If your social media activity also extends to services like Youtube, Google+ and Twitter, Social Bakers provides some free metrics across all these and more … there is extra data too if you want to pay for it. (Did you know, for example, that the ABC’s Liam Fox is PNG’s number one tweeter, with over 4000 followers? Liam could use a service such as Tweetreach to discover just how far all his 140-character ‘tweets’ are travelling.)

If you want to start assessing your online influence, sites such as Klout and Peerindex claim to measure this, although the metrics used to measure something as intangible as influence are still at an early stage of development.

If all this sounds a bit too complex, fear not. For a fee, online training site Grovo offers simple video tutorials on how to make the most of these, and a vast range of other web-based tools.