Top Ten Benefits to Installing Google Analytics on your Website

Posted by Phil on Nov 7, 2011 in Google, Web Optimization | 1 comment

Why did you build a website for your small business?  Did you have a specific goal in mind or did you just hire someone to build a website for your business because you read somewhere that you “had to have it”?  Either way, the chances are you’re having a hard time figuring out whether it was worth the investment.  After all, it’s built and it’s out there, but now what?

Now you should add Google Analytics to your website and really start turning it into a lean, mean marketing machine.  Read on for the top ten benefits to installing Google Analytics onto your small business’ website.

1. Find out where your visitors are coming from -  Google Analytics separates your site traffic into four categories – Search (Google, etc), Referral (Visitor clicked a link to your site), Direct (user typed in your web address), and Campaign (Paid Advertisements via Google AdWords).  You can examine each category individually for more detail.
2. Find out where your visitors are coming from… geographically! – Google Analytics will tell you which countries, states, and cities your website visitors live in.
3. Find out why visitors found your site - Google reports which terms visitors use when looking for your site in search engines.
4. Find out what parts of your site visitors like… and don’t - Google Analytics reports how long people spend looking at each page on your site and which pages most often send visitors away.
5. Optimize goal conversion - Whether the goal of your site is to sell products, have visitors fill out a contact form, or download a whitepaper, you can visualize the entire “sales funnel” within Google Analytics and identify the points at which your visitors are leaving.  This gives you the chance to optimize your website and increase conversions.
6. Optimize Google AdWords - Google Analytics works hand-in-hand with Google AdWords (Google’s popular digital advertising platform) to tell you not only which AdWords campaigns are driving traffic to your site but which campaigns are yielding conversions (and making you money)!
7. Track E-Commerce - By enabling Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking, you can quantify the value of a conversion, which adds a whole new dimension to analyzing the cost of your ad campaigns.  When linked with Google AdWords, Analytics will even calculate the profit margin of each sale for you.
8. Evaluate effectiveness of print and other traditional media - When creating multi-channel ad campaigns that drive traffic to your website you can tag each source, medium, campaign, and keyword independently.  You can then use Google Analytics to analyze which combination of mediums and messages are most successful.
9. It is Customizable - Google Analytics is completely customizable.  It offers dozens of reports on its own but you can create custom filters and reports to track what’s most meaningful to your business.  You can even add those reports to your Google Analytics homepage so they’re waiting for you the next time you login rather than having to navigate to it time and time again.
10. It’s FREE -  That’s right, you can add all these capabilities to your website free of cost.  All you need to sign up for Google Analytics is a GMail account or an email address hosted by Google.  Just follow the instructions here and you’re off and running!