Google Analytics is a free, powerful tool that helps you see all of the analytics related to your website. In other words, it shows you how many visits your website gets, where those visits come from, and what those visitors do on your website.
At first glance, it can look incredibly intimidating with all of it’s numbers, charts, graphs, and fancy words, but we promise it’s easier than it sounds! It definitely has a learning curve but using Google Analytics can have a huge effect on the growth of your company, and that is well worth taking a little time to learn the platform!
In this blog, I will give you the top 5 highlights of what Google Analytics can do for your business. Let’s get started!
One thing that almost every business has in common are goals. Goals are what help drive growth and keep you focused. One very handy tool that Google Analytics offers is the ability to see and even track custom goals for your business. Email sign ups, checking out, submitting a contact form, even clicking on a social media button, all of these and more are things you can track in Google Analytics.
But wait, there’s more! You can break down these metrics into a detailed outline of how that goal was completed. Side note! When a goal is completed, it is called a conversion. This detailed outline feature can show you the start to finish journey of the user, so that you can find out where your conversions are happening, and where they are getting abandoned along the way.
Finding out what your customers actually like is half the battle, if only there was a way to know this without asking them… THERE IS! Google Analytics can help you find out what content your customers are actually drawn to on your website and what they ignore. This way you can strategically create new content and stop wasting time on content that your customers aren’t going to react to.
For example, let’s say your business posts about blogs that help promote new products in your store. You can go to Google Analytics and see what category of blogs are getting the most traffic, and which blogs are struggling. This will give you a clear understanding as to which products you should focus on as well as which products you may want to avoid.
As a business owner you have probably run some sort of advertisement in the past. Sometimes these do great, but oftentimes they are complete shots in the dark and can have a negative return. Google Analytics can help you make well educated advertising decisions based off of the content that is performing well on your site.
Getting a ton of traffic for a certain service? Chances are, that service is needed in your area so ads being run for that service are more likely to succeed rather than an ad published on a guess. Along with knowing what kinds of ads to post, you can use Google Analytics Conversion Tracking to see if your ads are bringing in revenue.
Most small businesses struggle majorly in one area: Social Media converting to sales.
This is usually because, like advertising, social media can be a total shot in the dark. Not only on what sort of content to produce, but what platforms you should use. Sure, you could try to do them all at once, but why waste time and money where there’s no real return on investment?
Google Analytics can help you figure out what social platforms lead to sales on your website, so that you can cut off what doesn’t work and invest in what does. By narrowing your focus to platforms that perform well, you will be able to spend more effort into thoughtful content that helps you grow, rather than throwing a bunch of generic content at every single platform.
Aside from being able to help you connect more easily to your customers, Google Analytics can help you find out if your website needs a little TLC. As a business owner you are already running around with your “head cut off,” trying to do all-the-things, correct? You rarely have time to hang out on your own website page by page, checking that everything is working well. But never fear, Google Analytics is here to help with two major categories: Site Speed and Site Behavior.
Site Speed is crucial for gaining traction with your website. Studies show that if a site takes longer than 1 second to load, most users will just leave. Another study found that 75% of smartphone users expect to get immediate results while using their smartphone. Site Speed in Google Analytics can show you your site’s load times for both mobile and desktop, and help you troubleshoot ways to improve.
Site behavior is also very important because this tells you how users use your site and where users decide to leave it. This can be helpful to find out what information users aren’t connecting with and what parts of the website might be hard to navigate, causing users to leave. Part of this is the behavior flow, which shows a funnel drilldown of the navigation of your website, showing where users enter and exit your site and everywhere they go in between.
So, if you see that users are entering your homepage and leaving before they get to any real solid information, chances are your homepage isn’t user friendly and could use some love.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool with an almost endless supply of uses. When used well, Google Analytics can help your website and your business as a whole as well as run more smoothly and efficiently.
While we have barely scratched the surface in this blog of all the wonders of Google Analytics, we know it still might be overwhelming to someone completely new. That’s why we are always here to help!
Reach out for a free consultation or training session to see how Google Analytics could be useful for your business.
