The Answers You Seek Lie Within Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the key to unlocking your websites/marketing plan.
If knowledge is power and power corrupts then study hard and be evil. Apparently Mark Twain said that… I can’t be 100% sure but what I do know is the one of the most powerful tools when it comes to knowledge about your business, website and everything in between is Google Analytics. If you think you can handle the power of Analytics and use it for good without being corrupted then please, read on… but don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Google Analytics is a key tool to being able to unlock not only the potential of your website, but also the potential of your digital strategy. Think of it like this; imagine you’re running a shop on in a busy 24hr a day, 7 day a week shopping street in your city’s CBD. In this case you have the best product in the world, and you’re the best sales person in the world, sounds like you? Good.
Here is the catch, you’re blind folded.
Think about it… you can’t see a thing. You don’t know which products are selling, you don’t know which items people are looking at; you cannot see a thing.
The annoying thing for you is that you can’t up-sell and package popular items together, because you don’t know what people are looking at. You can’t set your shop up in such a way that encourages people to browse and buy in a logical manner, because you don’t know what they’re looking at. You have no idea how many people are entering your shop and then leaving without buying, because you can’t see how many people enter. Not only that, you don’t know at what times of the day to open your shop and when to shut it, because you’re completely in the dark.
It’s pretty easy to appreciate how difficult this would make running a successful business. I’m sure even if you were the best sales person with the best products in the busiest street, you would still struggle to make it work.
This is what running a website without Google Analytics is like. You’re completely flying in the dark with no idea what is or is not working on your site. The minute you get Analytics set up, the blind-fold is lifted and before you know it (if you know what you’re looking for) you can easily see what is working, how it’s working and why it’s working.
Take a step back for anyone who is sitting there asking, ‘sounds great, but what is it??’
Google Analytics is a simple piece of code that gets pasted into every page of your website, lifting the blind fold and giving us valuable data on user behavior. It’s a tool which can tell us things such as what pages people visit, how long they visit them for, in what order or sequence they visit the pages, where they begin their journey and where they end it. It can tell you where people visit from (geographically), what brought them to your site (be it direct traffic, organic Google searches, paid advertising such as AdWords, Facebook traffic or referral traffic from something such as an email marketing campaign or a link to your sire from a blog), the list goes on.
The beauty of Analytics is that it gives us all the tools we need (and even some we probably don’t) to know exactly how your site operates and allows us to test and measure using cold hard data, so that we can now make changes and understand how they affect results.
So how can you use Analytics on a daily level to better understand your customer?
A good place to start is by setting goals. What Google Analytics allows you to do is determine what is important to you, and then set that as a goal which you can track back to its source.
For example, if you have a contact form on each of the pages on your website, which once submitted, directs your customers to a thank you page (a page with the URL www.website.com/thankyou), you can track this page view as a destination goal. That is, a goal which fires off when someone reaches the /thankyou URL. This lets you know each time someone has made contact with you via the contact form and, allows you to begin to look a trends surrounding your customers. You can look at where they came from (for example, Facebook) which can help you justify allocating some of your advertising budget towards Facebook ads in the hope that more similar traffic will come through to the site and enquire about what you offer.
There are so many more examples of how Analytics can be used to better improve your understanding of how people operate around your business online, you could write a book on it and still not touch on everything. Everything from e-commerce tracking (which accounts for each and every dollar you make online, attributing it to its source and its conversion path), to event tracking which allows you to track what people click on, download and more. Even simple things such as how often people return to your site, the time since the last visit or what state or city they’re visiting your site from. Each of these behavioural elements are tracked by Analytics and stored within it, meaning you can segment your traffic and learn how your customers behave, so that you’re no longer in the dark. This in turn allows you to better target them and in the long run will lead to better results.
Google Analytics is an amazing tool which if put to good use can not only unlock the potential of your website, but also your digital marketing efforts, and best of all… it’s free. Speak to your digital strategist at SponsoredLinX today on 1300 859 600 and learn more about how Analytics can help your business.