Why is using Google Analytics important?
Let’s say you have set up an exhibition. You have a place established and people have started visiting. Some are leaving early while some are staying back longer. Some have shown interest in the displays while some are just merely looking. Some came to know about you through colleagues while others saw the banners outside.
Now, if you had the data of the people visiting you – why some left early and why some didn’t show any interest, then you can easily figure out your areas of improvement and work towards setting up an exhibition that has people talking about it for days.
Similarly, if you can figure out ways to improve your website to earn more profits, wouldn’t that be sweet? Enter Google Analytics – a tool that lets you find out what is working well, and more importantly, what isn’t!
Google Analytics is not important if you don’t like improvement or growth.
What are the benefits of using Google Analytics?
Data
Data drives the world and Data is only useful if you can make sense of it. Google analytics presents the data in various forms: lists, charts, graphs, pie charts, spreadsheets, and more—allowing you to see how your website is performing.
Reporting
The platform not only gives you data but also lets you draw conclusions from it. By comparing metrics within the data, you can gather further insights and identify causes and correlations—another reason why Google Analytics can benefit your business.
Real-time observation
Whatever data you’ll see in Google analytics is ongoing and in real-time. This means that you can create reports, compare metrics, and check performance on whatever basis you want—hourly, daily, monthly, yearly. You can also take note of peak times for your target audiences, such as whether certain pages, SEM campaigns, or blog posts gather more interest at certain points of the week, month, or year.
It’s free
Google won’t charge you anything for using their platform. You don’t need to purchase, subscribe, or provide credit card information. All you need is a Gmail account and the ability to install a tracking code on your website, and you’re ready to go.
What are your best tips for getting the most out of Google analytics?
- Monitor bounce rate to increase your conversion rate.
- Identify slow-loading pages to enhance user experience.
- Use the internal site search to optimize your customers’ experience.
- Analyze your users’ behaviour to better meet their needs.
- Measure overall organic traffic to better understand your users
- Use reports of landing pages to directly improve conversions.
- Analyze different traffic sources to cover more ground.
- Define several conversion goals to get the complete picture of your user’s behaviour.
- Analyze social media performance to enhance conversion.
- Measure the quality of SEO traffic to further optimize your SEO strategy.
What should small business owners know about Google analytics to be successful?
Leads, conversions and profits – that’s what every business owner, big or small is looking for! If used properly, Google Analytics can actively increase your conversion rates. There are direct and indirect benefits of using Google Analytics. And when you know exactly where and what to look at, you might be surprised by the insights you’ll get.
Using custom segments
Google Analytics has a feature called segments that make it easy to see how different groups of visitors interact with your website. Right out of the box, you can instantly check on several different default segments including mobile traffic, direct traffic, bounced sessions, converters and new users.
Setting up annotations
Google Analytics throws a lot of data at you, and it’s easy to forget about important findings. Annotations are essentially digital post-it notes that let you mark important notes on various traffic reports. You can mark the sudden surge in social media traffic, momentary dip in organic traffic etc. and come back to it whenever you want.
Comparing historical traffic
Google analytics lets you compare traffic from different periods of time. By regularly comparing your traffic, you can know where your business stands at that particular time and accordingly direct your team about the next step.
Apart from the aforementioned technical bit, you should know how to interpret the findings from Google analytics – only then can you turn failures into opportunities.