If somebody walked into your business premises and told you they had found difficulty gaining access, you would be concerned.
You would want to know why they had found it difficult and then you would want to do something about it. The thought of not allowing customers to easily beat a path to your door should fill you with fear.
If you’re not paying attention to your Google Analytics account then you are ignoring information that can show you the difficulties customers are having accessing your website.
So you should be filled with fear if you are not regularly utilizing the power of Google Analytics in exactly the same way as you would if people could not find you from the street.
What Exactly Are Analytics?
Talking about Analytics can be worrying. It can seem complicated and time-consuming. But if you educate yourself about even just the basics then you can easily have a positive impact on your online business.
Google Analytics is by far the most widely used tool for collecting statistics about how people interact with your website. Since it was launched in 2005, Google Analytics has developed into an incredibly powerful set of tools, most of which are available completely free.
But the problem with Google Analytics is that it can be complicated to a non-technical user. That’s why it is important that you focus on the key basics:
- Who visits your site?
- Where do your visitors come from?
- How long do they stay on your site?
- What path do they follow through your site?
- Where do they exit or site?
Even tracking these five pieces of information can dramatically transform your online business fortunes.
Key information about where your visitors come from, what times and days your traffic is highest and lowest, what pages they look at, where they leave your site, it’s all key information about your potential customers experience when visiting your website.
Simply by analyzing this basic data you can spot problems you had no idea about. You could spot that people accessing your site from a certain page are immediately leaving it at a higher rate than those people who arrive via other pages. This could point to a certain webpage not doing its job in encouraging people to take further action.
Small pieces of fine tuning are often found to bring large benefits. In the same way as you would want people to find your bricks and mortar shop, enter it, browse and make a purchase, by tweaking via analytics data you can ensure more people do the same with your website.
Track Your Social Networking Through Analytics
It’s not just your website data that can be tracked through Google Analytics. You can also track social media interactions as well.
By implementing simple code you can track Google+, Facebook and Twitter sharing on your website. If used in conjunction with the powerful analytical tools provided by all three of those platforms you can build up a complete picture of the success or failure of your social networking campaigns.
This may sound complicated, but once you do some reading, or look at videos on YouTube, it’s actually quite quick to set up. And if you are really struggling there will always marketing experts you can turn to, such as us here at Media Proper, to get the support you need.
Google Analytics Is Part Of A Completely Free Business Success Package
Google Analytics can be linked to your Google Webmaster tools account in a few minutes. When placed together, you can get a comprehensive picture not only of interactions on your website and through social media, but also data around search terms used to find you and links that have been built to your website.
You can get reports around how every visitor has been referred to your website and you can even set up tailored analytics with your own custom goals.
If you have an online shop, then Google Analytics can be really crucial to your success. By plugging into your online store you can track every stage of the sale, including tracking conversions. If you are selling hundreds of products it can be really difficult to understand what you can change to increase your conversions, by using the free tools provided by Google Analytics the mist can be cleared easily.
How Do I Get Started Right Now?
Well, I would advise you start by finding and tracking these following three key metrics:
Visitors
From the visitors overview report you can see data on visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate.
Traffic Sources
This is a great report especially if you are also using paid advertising. It will break down in detail where your traffic is coming from.
Landing pages
By looking in detail at the page is your website which attract the most visitors and then analyzing the data on what they do when they arrive, and how quickly they leave, you can tweak content to retain more visitors and pass them into your sales funnel.
By becoming proficient at understanding these three areas you can spot massive opportunities for your website social media interactions and paid advertising. Just small tweaks in any of these areas can remove barriers that may have been invisibly stopping you from making a sale.
Media Proper has a long track record with expertly helping local businesses in the Philadelphia area to manage, analyze and tweak their online marketing campaigns to maximize profitability.
If you would like to speak to our team about how your local business can use analytics to move your online business up to the next level then drop is a line for a no obligation chat.