Google Analytics: What Is It & How Should You Use It?
Posted on 20th November 2018
Having a quality website is the starting point of your digital marketing strategy. Coupled with social media posting to raise awareness of your brand, and possibly paid advertisements or SEO to help drive traffic, having an all-round marketing strategy is vital to your business success.
However, having a website isn't enough. Yes, I’m here to say that having just a website isn’t enough!
The overall aim of any business is to get new sales. This happens by getting new leads and enquiries, ideally from your website. It all sounds easy so far, but several questions people ask are:
Why should Google rank your website above others?
Why should potential customers choose you as opposed to your competitors (who are also fighting for rankings)?
What makes you different to your competitors?
How is your website performing at the moment in terms of statistics?
In my experience as a website consultant, I’ve noticed that most business owners get a website and then think that the box is ‘ticked’ and that they don’t have to do much else.
Sadly, most of them are losing out on plenty of business that’s there to be had by not utilising the tools available, especially when the it’seeze Websites platform is so easy to use for editing, blogging, and integrating analytics tools just like Google Analytics for improving conversions.
Viewing your website statistics is vital, it gives you a benchmark for where you’re at now, what you can improve, tweak, and then measure going forward.
Offered by the biggest and most popular search engine in the world, Google Analytics is a digital analytic web tool recommended to be utilised by every website owner. Gathering a huge amount of real-time data collection and storage, it provides in-depth insights and information that will help you understand your actual website audience and their behaviour on your website.
1. It enables an automated collection of data
You can set it, and forget about it. Google Analytics collect data on an automatic basis. As long as you list your site and connect it as a property, Google Analytics will do all the work for you.
Access your dashboard and all the data it has gathered so far will pop up, together with real-time information.
2. Create custom Google Analytic Reports
Although Google Analytics comes with the feature of having immediate, categorised reports, you can customise your data further. Depending on its set dimensions and metrics, you can see your gathered data sorted into various levels, such as their browser type, their mobile operating system, and even according to the web pages they visited.
3. It gives an overview to your website visitors' behaviour
You can easily access your site visitors' behaviour through the tab called "Behavior Flow", where you can track and trace where they come from, which pages they landed on (or, to put it simply, which pages they saw first), and where they left or clicked exit. Overall behaviour, however, can be analysed through taking all these data elements and combining them into one huge insight to make your marketing strategy better overall.
4. Through its data collection, you can profile your website visitors
These levels of data collection will, in time, give you a usual profile of the kind of customers that visit your website. Are you attracting iOS users, or are you more inclined to have Android visitors? Through this kind of data collection, you can probably also improve your site's mobile version, and pay more focus to it than the desktop version.
5. You can determine underperforming content
What particular page of your website are your visitors suddenly leaving? Google Analytics shows you the web pages that have the lowest percentage of viewing time. This can tell you what content isn’t working for your website, or what type of content you should avoid using.
6. It doesn’t come with a price
Aside from having the great advantage of seeing gathered data and information, the next best thing about Google Analytics is that it's free. Most web tools ask for subscription fees and one-time payments. In Google's case, it’s free.
Google Analytics is an important tool (some would say vital) that you can use to gauge your website's performance. Whether you're actively doing SEO, PPC, or just wanting to improve your conversions and get more leads, you can use the analytics tool in a variety of ways that will help you achieve that.
At it’seeze Windsor we highly recommend using it as part of your digital growth strategy and to get more kick out of your existing website's performance! Don't have an existing website? Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help.
Tagged as: Online Marketing
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