It’s a lot easier now than ever to measure your business results, so why isn’t everyone doing it? It’s easy to see that if you don’t, your competition might be. While analytics tools are free, they’re also incredibly complex. You’ve got to understand the difference between pageviews and sessions, or you’ll miss out on important information about your visitors.
If you’re a small business, it’s easy to overlook these details, but your site visitors want to know that they’re getting the most out of your marketing, and that includes understanding how they’re spending their time on your site. Google Analytics makes it easy to track everything you’re doing online.
A few key features include:
Visitor information
With Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about your website’s traffic: who’s coming to your site, when they’re coming, and what they do after they arrive. It’s even possible to measure your site’s popularity by looking at traffic from different countries and cities. This allows you to see if your message is resonating with your audience, or if your site is being targeted by people outside your local area.
Traffic sources
While you can only see how your site visitors found you (through keywords), you can also learn more about the different ways that your site visitors are reaching you. Are they arriving via email? Facebook? Social media? Do people who visit your site stay longer, or do they leave quickly?
Tracking goals
The goal of your marketing is to get people to take action on your site, and this means that it’s important to learn how effective your methods are. How many people are clicking the links that you post, and what percentage of them convert into sales? Google Analytics lets you track conversions from the moment a visitor lands on your site.
Campaigns
It can be hard to tell what parts of your site are performing well, so Google Analytics makes it easy to create individual campaigns for your various marketing initiatives. From social media ads to e-mail campaigns to special promotions, Google Analytics allows you to see what’s working and what’s not.
Analytics Dashboards
The data collected by Google Analytics is stored in a database, and it can be overwhelming. But you can customize it so that you see only the information that you need. With a dashboard, you can view data in the form of graphs and charts that make it easy to compare performance between pages and even different types of content.
You can also see your analytics data in real time. You can create custom reports to show your site visitors the type of information you need, and you can set up alerts to tell you when certain things happen.
The best part is that you can add your Google Analytics data directly into your existing analytics tools, which gives you the best of both worlds.
In a nutshell: If you are running a business then the importance of Google Analytics can never be underestimated.