What is Google Analytics?
Why does your business need Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a widely used and highly versatile tool to measure the performance of your website. Firstly let’s look at how we measure our websites, and why it is important.
Google Analytics lets us look at how we acquire visitors to our website, track their behaviour and monitor their path to purchase. Easy. But what if your visitors aren’t converting, or you’re not getting visitors to your website?
It is almost impossible to create a website and expect visitors and conversions to happen overnight. Every website is different, which means how you market your website is different to how your favourite website may do so, or how your competitors are marketing theirs.
Do you fully understand who your target audience is, or who your customers are?
Google Analytics lets us see how we acquire visitors, to which pages, how long they stay on each page, where they go next – or where they leave…
So why do we use Analytics?
- Understand Consumer Behaviour & Increase Revenue
- Set up and monitor Goals & Conversions
- See where visitors are leaving your site
- Monitor Website Traffic
- Access Real-Time Data
- Decrease Marketing Costs
- Examine Path to Purchase
- Monitor Multi-Channels
- Time Efficiency
10 Google Analytics Tips
1. Discover how your visitors are finding you
Through Acquisition & Referrals, we can see the top ways in which visitors are being directed to your website.
You may see that the majority of traffic is coming to your website through Google, this is great, but it’s important to have a wide range of sources finding your website. This feature in Analytics helps us capitalise on what is working well for us, and helps us make amendments on what isn’t working so well.
2. Visitor Location
If you’re selling Plumbing services in Galway, your website shouldn’t be targeting visitors in Central America. Google Analytics lets your clearly identify your visitor demographic and make important changes to ensure your website is functioning correctly.
This is especially useful when running PPC Campaigns, it is a great tool that could save you a lot of money over time.
3. Visitor Engagement
What’s being viewed on your website, and what isn’t? Google Analytics lets us see which pages users are engaging with the most, and which pages they are not. If you have a page that is important to your website, but it is not being acknowledged, then this is a big problem that needs to be fixed.
Analytics helps us to optimise the pages that are most important to us, this could be the products and services page of your website, it maybe the most important goal is to get customers to contact you?
4. Goals
Goals are a way to track the actions that are important to your business’s objectives. Goals can be set up for almost anything, including for users making a purchase on your site, or when a visitor signs up to your mailing list. Goals are tailored to your business and your business’s objectives.
Typically conversions are the most vital goals for your business, and Google has several templates to help you trace conversions effectively. You’ll be able to monitor your conversion progress as a tool for sales and ROI.
5. Real-Time Audience
Viewing your real-time viewers may seem a bit of a novelty at first, however this is a great tool for monitoring your visitors behaviour first-hand.
As you release a new page or a blog post or interact with a customer over twitter, real-time allows you be in the present and engage with your audience.
6. Custom Dashboards
Dashboards allow you to create multiple displays to show only the data that you want to see on the front page of Google Analytics. Be it raw data, graphs, bar charts, pie charts or line graphs.
Perhaps you are using a Google Analytics dashboard to present to colleagues or someone in your business. Dashboards are as easy as drag and drop and are a great accompanying tool for presenting data.
7. Webmaster Tools
If you haven’t already come across Google Webmaster Tools don’t worry, but you should sign up straight away. Google Webmaster Tools let’s us monitor our website’s health, keywords, broken URL’s and site errors. Using Webmaster Tools is fundamental in ensuring Google likes your website.
Integrate Webmaster Tools through your Google Analytics for extra queries, geographical outlines and landing pages.
8. Browser and Mobile Compatibility
Google Analytics shows us what devices our visitors are using, which operating system they are using, Windows, OSX, Android etc. and even which internet browser, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome and even whether they are a mobile user.
This may not seem important right away, but this information can help in ensuring that our website is compatible and optimised for all platforms. If 90% of your visitors are Apple phone users then we need to ensure that they have the best user experience possible.
9. E-mail Campaigns
With Google Analytics it is possible to track incoming visitors through e-mail campaigns sent to your customers. It is also possible to view how many people have opened your e-mail and clicked on your link to your website.
E-mail marketing is still a very effective marketing technique and is a great way to interact with current and prospective customers.
10. Keywords
Analytics shows us a variety of ways in which users find our website through the keywords that they use on Search Engines.
Keyword Research is a very important part in obtaining the right visitors and potential customers for our website.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, Google Analytics doesn’t just happen. In order to use Google Analytics you must first:
- Create an account http://www.google.com/analytics/
- Implement the tracking code on your website
- Click verify to check the code is working correctly
- You should now have access to Google Analytics
Aside from using Google Analytics online, you have the power to create custom dashboards for visual representation as well as generating high-end reporting tailored for your business needs. At first glance Google Analytics can seem a little daunting, but the success of your business depends on being able to manage your website’s performance, monitor consumer behaviour and make the fundamental changes necessary to increase conversions and ROI.
Itchy Fingers Design can set up your Google Analytic’s account for you and fully manage your campaigns and performance. Get in touch to see how we can work together.
