Google Analytics: Cheap Date or Long-Lost BFF?

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Ever had a friend tell you that you’re getting chunky around the midsection or point out a huge booger in your nose? If you’re like me, your first reaction is probably sheer embarrassment. After a few seconds though, you normally appreciate the comment because you know that good friends have a way of being honest to us when we need it, not just when we want it. They manage to bring us back to reality and keep us focused on our goals. I guess what I’m trying to say is…. without BFFs, we’d probably all be fat, snotty-nosed slobs.

In the online marketing world, Google Analytics is the quintessential best friend. It keeps it real at all times and will never sugarcoat the truth. Take a moment and get (re) acquainted with your best friend.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics (GA), consider this your freshman intro class. In short, GA is a tracking system, placed within websites, that allows web owners to monitor the behavior of visitors on their website. It is by far one of the most important online tools that you can possess if you expect to increase sales or sales leads through your website. And guess what, it’s $Free.99 !

Let’s start with the fundamentals of having a website. Chances are, you’re utilizing your site to showcase the products and services that you offer, explain your company’s advantages, display a company mission statement, and list contact information, amongst other things. Great job, the foundation is laid. However, all of that means very little if you’re unable to definitively say that your website has a direct impact on your bottom line. With Google Analytics you’ll be able to make that assertion because it helps you keep track of how well your website is performing and gives valuable insights into making it perform better.

Ask yourself a few questions:

1)   How many people visit my website each week?

2)   How many visitors are taking my most desired action when visiting?

3)   What page(s) on my website do visitors exit from most often?

4)   Where are visitors coming from before visiting my website?

Know the answer to each of these questions? If not, you’re doing yourself a supreme injustice. With GA running on your website, you can uncover all of these answers, plus more.

Let me expound on Google Analytics’ capabilities and explain why it’s helpful for my business. With GA, I can:

• See how many people visit my site. This gives me a clear indication of how many potential customers are exposed to my products/services in a given time period. This number is particularly important when I launch a new marketing campaign that directs people back to my website because I can clearly see how effective (or ineffective) the campaign based on the increase or decrease in the number of visitors. In general, you should always aim to increase web visitors month-over-month.

• See which website referred traffic to my site. Being able to see which other websites are sending visitors to my site is extremely valuable because it gives me insight into where my target customers hang-out online. By knowing this, I can start giving extra attention to these referring sites. In other words, I can invest more time posting information about my company on those sites, advertising on those sites, and/or  having dialogues with the other users of the referring sites. For instance, I know that LinkedIn refers the most traffic to my website each week. Therefore, I now spend more time utilizing LinkedIn.

• See which pages visitors spend the most and least amount of time on. This gives me a clear indication of what pages are valuable to visitors and which are not. To give you an example, if a visitor only spends 10 seconds on my website’s homepage then leaves my website, there’s a good chance that the page is confusing or not valuable to the visitor. Conversely, if all visitors spend 1 minute on the homepage before going to another page within my site, they’ve probably gotten to know my company intimately and can make a more informed decision when choosing our services.

• Get an email or text alert when a visitor takes a desired action. There are a couple of really important things that I would like each visitor to do when they visit my website. One of which is make a purchase. Obviously every visitor does not do this, but I like to keep track of each visitor who gets close (i.e. gets to the purchase web page on the site) so that I know how many people at least considered making a purchase. A large amount of potential purchasers with a small amount of actual purchasers indicates that there is a page in the purchase process which is making visitors unwilling to spend money.

• Do a host of other things such as identify which computer browsers my visitors use; what countries they’re visiting from; how many are using smartphones to view my site; how many are returning visitors; see the exact page path each visitor travels on my site; see how my site performs in Google search or on social networks; and much much more!

Now see why it’s so valuable? Once the GA code is placed on your site, you can monitor these statistics in near real-time, examining data in a multitude of different ways. You can see the data for the last hour, last day or week, or even 10 years! You can also compare recent data to past data or correlate data against other data points. The information that you can gather about your website is almost endless!

These are just some of the fundamental features of Google Analytics. It’s a very robust tool so stay tuned for a more in-depth where I explain some of the advanced features.

If you are not currently using GA, I recommend reading my post about how to add Google Analytics to a website.