Are you getting the most out of your website? If you’re not keeping an eye on who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing when they visit, the answer is almost undoubtedly “No”.
Your website can be your most powerful sales and marketing tool if you understand what’s working and what’s not. But how do you get this information? The good news is, there are many tools available to help you analyse your website performance, and many of them are free. One of the most important free tools available is Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics and what does it do?
Google Analytics is a service (provided by Google, of course) that generates detailed information about your website traffic. With Analytics, you can get all kinds of data about how many visitors you’re getting, where they come from, how long they stay, how many pages they visit and which pages they’re most likely to view when they get there.
Not only that, but you can see your website performance over time and get a sense of your visitors’ behaviour. Are you getting more or fewer visitors than you used to? Are some pages much more popular than others? Are visitors spending less time on certain pages than you want? Once you have this data, you can start looking at ways to improve your overall site performance.
Google also provides information about which browsers and operating systems your visitors are using, as well as whether they’re viewing the site from a desktop/laptop computer or a mobile device. Since more and more visitors are now using mobile devices, this information provides solid clues about whether mobile viewers are able to access and use your site.
How do you get Analytics?
To get Analytics running on your site, there are two basic things you need to do: 1) Use (or open) a Gmail account with Google to sign up for the service, and 2) Get a snippet of html code – which Google will provide for you – installed on the pages of your website. Usually, your marketing consultant or web developer can assist you in getting and installing this code so you can start tracking data.
How to use this information to help you
Having statistics about your site is nice – and these alone may help give you some ideas about what to improve – but Google Analytics can also help you measure campaigns, conversions and sales.
For instance, if you’re sending out an email campaign that’s connected to a designated landing page on your website, Analytics can help you track campaign results by showing you exactly how many visitors came to that page and whether or not they took the action you wanted them to (such as filling out a contact form, taking advantage of a special offer, etc.). You can use this information to determine how successful your efforts are.
You can also set up Goals in Analytics to see how many people are taking a specific action. For example, let’s say you have one primary goal when people come to your site: You want them to sign up for your newsletter so that you capture their email addresses. With Analytics, you can set up a Goal to track how many visitors are doing what you want them to. Once you know this, you can try making adjustments to your content, layout, buttons, etc., to see if performance improves.
Have more questions about Google Analytics and how to use it? Need help setting up goals? Contact us – and stay tuned for more on Google Analytics!
