The Power Of Google Analytics
Simply having a website is not enough to gain customers and optimize your efforts in doing so. Google Analytics is an awesome free tool to help you track data on your site and improve your tools for acquiring leads and conversions. But, you’ll want to set it up correctly in order to maximize the benefits, or otherwise hire an outside agency that has an expert on their team. A major pain point for many small or medium businesses is just this, making sure that Google Analytics is properly set up in order to get the best value out of it.
What it Can Do
Google Analytics essentially tracks data for eCommerce, publishers, lead generation, and support websites. It analyzes your web traffic to find bounce rates; average lengths of time users spend on site; any attributes about the users such as age, gender, and location; clicks; views; the most common pathways through your site; the user’s first and last pages visited; total sessions; new vs returning users; and more. You can gain insight into where and who your customers are before and during their time with your website. Meaning, you can learn those certain attributes about the user before they get on your site, but also see that they’re coming from Facebook, a search, or elsewhere. Google provides even more depth into each value when you click on it, by the way!
Since your website is where you want all of your digital traffic to end up, whether it’s through ads or otherwise, it should be the heart of seeing how well all of your campaigns are performing.
There’s a few benefits to using Google Analytics. First, you can learn more about who your audience is and therefore retarget them or put more investment into certain ad spaces. You can see what pages on your website are gaining a lot of attention or traction and conversely find the problem pages where there needs improvement. While it seems like not much, it’s huge to have a tool that helps you enhance your website and content production, plus inform your marketing and SEO strategies.
Why You Want to Set it Up Correctly
What you have to do in order to set up Google Analytics is basically embed a tracking code into the code of your website. From there, you can set up goals, which tells Google what is important for your business to track. This could be when a visitor ends up on a confirmation or thank you for purchasing or giving your contact information page, signaling conversion. If you have a search function, you can set Google up to track all the searches made on your site.
There’s also a tool called Google Tag Manager, which not only helps your website move faster for users, but helps you improve your paid acquisition strategy. You can track using not only the Google Analytics tools but also Facebook Pixels and other tracking sources, all in one place. With the Google Tag Manager though you’ll need to choose whether to set up Google Analytics alone or within the manager, not both.
Some websites are easier to set Google Analytics up on, like WordPress, while websites like Shopify have their own specific way of doing it. An added complication is using Google Analytics for multiple websites and setting it up correctly for all of them.
The bottom line is that you’ll want to set it up correctly from the start in order to get the data that you want without outside influences or information you don’t need bugging up the real numbers.
Or Hire an Agency to Do it For You
Look, there’s a lot of different reports, custom reports, a dashboard, segments, and other features in Google Analytics. You probably won’t need to use all of them, but you don’t want to miss the ones that you could utilize. Unless you want to take a course and study up on google analytics, it may be wise to hand it over to an expert. If you want to take a stab at it yourself, Google provides steps to get started.
If you don’t have the time to devote to learning Google Analytics, or you’ve tried and it’s going way over your head, reach out to us and we can help.
