Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an amazing free tool brought to you by Google. Most business owners have heard about it, fewer have installed it on their site and even less know how to interpret and use the results. So what exactly is Google Analytics and why is it such a great tool? Google Analytics allows you to track and measure different website statistics relating to your visitors, traffic generation and website content which is a must to test whether your content is what your visitors want to read and/or purchase, how effective any internet marketing and social media strategies you are using are and how popular your website is and by whom.
To start your Google Analytics training and install Google Analytics all you need to do is add a piece of code that your Google analytics account gives you, to your website pages in order for Google to start tracking your website results. It won’t give you any website history, it starts collating information from the moment you have installed the code correctly. You can sign up for a Google Analytics account here: http://www.Google.com/analytics
Let’s start with the scenario, you are a sole business owner with a website with 10 pages. These pages consist of the home page, about us page, contact us page, terms and conditions, 3 articles on your field of expertise, a page about your services, a links page and a product page. Your product sales are very low each month and enquiries about your services create more spam than actual requests and you are beginning to wonder what the point of having a website is, especially as you seem to be online 24/7 taking part in a variety of social networking activities and isn’t this what you are supposed to be doing? Afterall web 2.0 is the future of internet marketing and social networking is part of that trend and it seems to be working for everyone else.
If you are not tracking any of your results to see what is working and what’s not then you are basically running your business blind. You could easily be working 24/7 on your business with little or no return as you don’t know what to focus on. By installing Google Analytics on your website, you give yourself a fighting chance to get your online business back in control, under YOUR control.
Even with a weeks worth of data, you can start analysing the information it delivers. You can check how many visitors you are getting to your website, how they are arriving at your website whether directly, by typing in your web address into their browser, by a referral website, links that you may have set up using social media or any internet marketing strategies you have implemented or finally by search engine. The best bit about the search engine section is that it gives you a list of all the keywords that your visitors have typed into their search engine to find you. You will also be able to find what pages on your website are the most popular, and which are the least popular and do something about it.
Using the previous example of an online business owner, he can start using Google Analytics to see which pages are bringing in the most visitors and perhaps use these pages to promote his products and/or services. He can use the keywords that his Google Analytics account tells him that his visitors are using to drive more traffic to his site and if the keywords they are finding him with aren’t related to his business, then he can do something about it. As he is spending 24/7 promoting his business through social media, his Google Analytics results will tell him which activities are driving the most traffic so that he can concentrate on those instead of trying to squeeze everything in and hope for the best.
There is so much more that, as an online business owner, Google Analytics can tell you but unfortunately you’ll need to either sign up for our free Google Analytics report at http://www.internetgrowthsystems.com/Google-Analytics/google-analytics-free-report.html or tune in next time for the next installment.
