Google Analytics is a great tool for small business owners, particularly if you’re looking to gain a better understanding of how your customers and prospects are using your website, or if you are interested in seeing just how hard your marketing dollars are working for you.
It would be impossible to show you everything that Google Analytics has to offer, because there is a LOT, but let’s take a look at some of the basics to help get you started.
Google Analytics 101
Getting Started – Visit the Google Analytics website and create an account. Once you’ve created an account you’ll receive a snippet of code to insert into your website. If you don’t have access to the back-of-house of your website you may need to ask your website administrator to insert it for you.
Goals – The next step is to identify what actions you would like to monitor. The Google Analytics platform refers to these things as ‘goals’ and you’ll need to create goals to measure certain actions. There are four basic goal types:
- Duration – How long each individual visit to your website lasts
- Destination – Where the visitor ‘landed’ within your site
- Pages Per Visit – How many pages a person viewed before leaving the site
- Events – What actions a visitor took during the visit including shares, ad clicks etc
Traffic Reports – Use traffic reports to discover how users are finding your website, including keywords used to find your content and direct links from other websites across the internet.
The real value of Google Analytics is that you’re able to consistently get to know more about your customers’ tastes and preferences, which means you’re better able to create a website that caters to their needs and we all know – a better website leads to a more profitable business.
