How You Can Use Google Analytics To Serve Your Business And Drive More Performance

If your organization has a website, Google Analytics is a must-have analytics tool you should leverage. Here’s a sampling of the benefits the tool offers:

• See how people are finding your site - Google Analytics can provide you information on how your website visitors found you because it tracks how many people land on your website. It can determine if someone came from search results, social media, other websites, paid ads, or typing your website directly within their browser. If you use any marketing to raise awareness for your website, this information is critical to understand how your efforts are working.
• Track what people do when they’re on your website - Getting people to your website is the first big hurdle you face, but making sure they stick around and come back is just as important. Behavior reports within Google Analytics provide information on which pages people often come to first on your website, what pages they click through to next (if any), and how long they spend on your website by direct-to-site visitors, Google visitors, Facebook visitors, and more.
• Understand if your site is serving your business goals - Google Analytics allows you to assign goals that will help you to track the customer’s journey based on their actions. You can measure performance on up to 20 different goals highly important to your business like making a purchase, completing a lead generation form, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an ebook, and more.
• Identify your audience's demographics - Audience reports within Google Analytics can provide you a wealth of information about the people who visit your site like their age, gender, interests, devices, location, and more. This data can be used to better understand who your customer is and ultimately allow you to better target and engage them.
• Measure internal site search - Monitoring what searchers are looking for within your site can give you greater insight into your potential customers and what they want. It also reveals the area of growth opportunity by uncovering the situations where the certain situation may be unclear or lacking on your site.  These insights can direct you to make changes that improve your website's performance and potentially your products or services.
• Understand why visitors are leaving your site without making a conversion - Bounce Rate is one of the most important metrics Google Analytics provides, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after visiting only one page. It is extremely important to reduce this rate as much as possible because a low Bounce Rate means that your visitors are finding what they are looking for and are engaging with you further. Google Analytics can provide detailed reports on what pages have high bounce rates, and you can use that information to make adjustments to better provide visitors the content they're seeking.
• It's free! - If you have a limited budget, everything else on this list could sound awesome without convincing you it’s worth shelling out money for this tool. But you don’t have to shell out anything. Google Analytics is 100% free, so no matter what your budget is, you can afford it.

How To Get Started With Google Analytics

There are several steps to get Google Analytics up-and-running. Some of the steps can be quite technical and complex, but here's the overall flow set-up an account:

• Create a Google Analytics account - If you have a Google account, you can go to Google Analytics and click the "Start For Free" button. You will then be greeted with the set-up wizard that will guide you through creating a Google Analytics account.
• Install a tracking code on every page of your site - This coding allows your site to communicate with Google Analytics and to track what is happening on your site. Here's an example of what that code may look like:

• Set-up "Goals" within Google Analytics - These settings will tell Google Analytics when something important has happened on your site. For example, if you have a website where you generate leads through a contact form, this setting will track how many people visit your thank you page after they have submitted their contact information.
  

Interested In Learning More?

Contact Funnel Digital Marketing today to discuss how Google Analytics can specifically benefit your business and how you can understand how people interact with you online.