If you have a website for your business, you must be marketing it so that people know it is there. A list of the main areas your marketing efforts will focus on will probably look something like this:
- Getting new business
- Converting visitors into buyers
- Retaining customers
- Generating leads
But how do you know if your efforts are working, whether they are heading in the right direction and that your marketing budget is well spent? Another thing that is important in the digital world is understanding your customer. If you have a walk-in shop you straight away know your customer, but this isn’t the case when operating a business online; you are not able to see your customers, understand their problems and the journey they made towards buying your product or service.
So many questions; and how do you find answers to them? Here is where analytics comes into play. There are many analytics and statistical packages available online, but we are going to be talking about Google Analytics – as it is free, provides tonnes of information and has an upgrade path to a premium version (known as Google Analytics 360) when your business is through the roof and you are looking for more data with extra added features.
So what is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video and social networking sites and applications. Google Analytics gives you the digital analytics tools you need to analyze data from all touch points in one convenient place for a deeper understanding of the customer experience. You can then share the insights that matter with your whole organization.
Features include:
- Google Analytics can be linked up with the Google AdWords, so you can instantly review your AdWords campaigns, customer behaviour and conversions.
- Google Analytics’ approach is to show high-level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. So it is used by new as well as advanced users.
- Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization; where visitors came from, how long they stayed and their geographical position.
- It also provides more advanced features including custom visitor segmentation.
- Google Analytics e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports shows a site’s transactions, revenue and many other commerce-related metrics.
- Google Analytics can be linked up with the Google Search Console to view all the data in Google Analytics view.
- Google Analytics features ‘In page Analytics’ which shows user click patterns on a page which can help the webmaster to make the website more useful to the user.
Google Analytics is the most widely used website statistics service currently in use on around 55% of the 10,000 most popular websites. (Reference)
Most of the web platforms (e-commerce and non e-commerce) offer very easy integration options with Google Analytics, making it more popular among various levels of users and webmasters.
If you need any help in installing Google Analytics on your site or help with starting a Google Analytics account or with linking them all together, call us on 01463 898043 and our team of expert Digital Marketers can advise.
