If you’re not using Google Analytics, or have only dabbled in it but aren’t using it to its full potential, you are missing out on a great way to boost the success of your business. Many businesses don’t even have any analytics in place to measure their website traffic, which means they're missing out on a great opportunity to learn about their visitors and increase their sales. Here is why Google Analytics is so important, as well as some pointers on how you can get started using it today.
Using Google Analytics to Measure Website Success
If you have a business website or blog, then you need Google Analytics. It can answer tons of different questions for you, including:
- How many people visit your site
- Where your visitors live
- What pages are most popular
- How much time visitors spend on your site
- Where your visitors are coming from
- What marketing emails are working best
- How many visitors convert into customers
- Is your website running fast enough
- Is your website good enough for mobile users
Using Google Analytics is free and super easy. You just have to create a Google Analytics account. You can do so using your Google account or by creating a new one specifically for Analytics. If you do connect it to an existing account, just be sure that it is yours and not someone who could potentially leave the business. Otherwise, all your data may walk away with them.
Google will ask you to fill out information about your account, including your time zone, industry category and more. It will also walk you through sharing Google Analytics. Then you can install your Google Analytics tracking code. You have to keep this on every page on your website. Depending on which platform you are using, you can find tutorials that explain how to do this.
Once your tracking code is installed, you can configure your Goals setting in Analytics. Just go to the Admin link at the top of your Analytics page and scroll down to the Goals tab under the View column. You can set up personal goals that track the information that’s most important to you. This could be the number of visitors who click to download a file or fill out a contact form. You can even attach a dollar value to a goal if it has one. You can also create up to 20 goals for your business. These should be goals that are super important to your business, such as purchases or milestones that will likely lead to sales.
Integrating Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a free tool you can use to easily add and update website tags. You can use this for conversion tracking, general site analytics and more. That way you don’t have to maintain each code snippets in your source files on your site. To set it up on the web, go to tagmanager.google.com and create an account. Create a container for your site within that account and add the container snippet to your site.
Using Search Console
Search Console is a webmaster tool that can help you create and maintain Google-friendly websites and mobile apps. Once you add your site, you can analyze clicks from Google Search - this shows you how many people are clicking on various links after they have searched a certain word or phrase. You can get alerts for critical errors or issues on your site so you can address them immediately. And you can test whether Google can successfully understand your content or if it could be better optimized.
The site search is another handy tool that Google provides. If you have a search box on your site, go to the Google Analytics Admin menu and back to the View column. Click on View Settings and scroll down to Site Settings. Switch that from Off to On. Then head to your site and conduct a search for any term and hit enter. Look at the site URL that pops up to see if it has an “s” or “q” as the query parameter. Enter the corresponding parameter back on the Site Settings page and click Save. Now you can have a record of all the terms people are searching for on your site in order to gain a better understanding of what your visitors are trying to find.
Event Tracking
Event tracking within Google Analytics is a way to get an alert when a specific event occurs. This could be something like a drastic spark or drop in the number of users or sessions, goal conversions or whatever other metrics you are interested in tracking. For instance, if you send out an email blast, you can track to see if it brings in a spike in visitors or not. You can receive these tracking reports daily, weekly or monthly depending on how you plan to use them.
Behavior Flow
Behavior reports give you information about how your content is performing. The Behavior Flow tracks a visitor’s journey through your site. You can learn what brought visitors to you, what sections of the website they were drawn to and which area they were looking at when they left. For instance, maybe they came to your blog from another website, then looked at your About Us page and then at your Services page. It’s a great way to identify the most well-performing content on your site, as well as potential problem areas. To set these up, go to your Reporting Tab and head to Behavior and then Behavior Flow.
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Hopefully, these tips will help you start implementing Google Analytics in your marketing strategy right away.