Top Ten Benefits to Installing Google Analytics on your Website
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.
- 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.
- Find out where your visitors are coming from… geographically! – Google Analytics will tell you which countries, states, and cities your website visitors live in.
- Find out why visitors found your site - Google reports which terms visitors use when looking for your site in search engines.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
Read More
Free Google AdWords Credits, The DBS Recession Buster
Let’s face it – the economy is in bad shape. There are talks of inflation and increased taxes in the news, and it looks like growing a small business just isn’t going to get any easier any time soon; however, Denton Business Solutions (“DBS”) is here to help.
Thanks to Google, we can give twenty businesses $100 Google AdWords credits for FREE. As we’ve written before, Google AdWords is a program that allows a business to purchase targeted online advertising on millions of websites across the Internet, including the search results on Google.com. There is no minimum monthly spend, no long-term contract, and you can change your ads or cancel your entire account at any time. It has been proven to be more efficient than print or other older advertising methods many times over, but don’t take our word for it – see what these small business owners have to say about the AdWords program:
If you’d like to use Google AdWords to jump-start your small business’ growth, we’d be delighted to help you get started with a free $100 credit. Just send us an e-mail and we’d be happy to get you set up!
Read More
How to Add a User to Google Analytics
If you’ve implemented Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic statistics you’ll find that over the course of time you’ll occasionally need to share your data with coworkers, marketing or technology consultants, or others. While Google Analytics does have export and reporting functionalities, sometimes it’s just easier to give people direct access to your Analytics account, and this is exactly what we’ll be teaching you how to do in this video – to enable others to access your Google Analytics data.
- First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics and login.
- Click on the profile name of the site whose data you would like to share.
- Click the gear near the top-right corner of the page.
- Click the “Users” tab.
- On the Users tab, you can see the name, e-mail address, and role of all the users who currently have access to this profile.
- To add a new user click the “Add New User” button.
- Enter the Google e-mail address of the individual you’d like to add to this Analytics profile, then click “Create User”.
- Confirm that the user was successfully added. The default role for a new user is “Collaborator”, which means the user can view all data within this profile but cannot grant new users access as we just did. If you would like make your new user an Administrator you can easily do that.
- First click the “settings” link for that user, to the right of his role.
- On the Profile User Settings screen, click the button next to “Administrator” and then click “Save”.
Read More
How to Sign up for Google Analytics
This video is the first in a series of “How-To” instructional segments. We get many questions about how to sign up for and use Google Analytics so the first few videos will cover Google Analytics and its various features and functionality; however if you have any requests for videos on other subjects please feel free to contact us. Also, as this is our first training video we highly encourage you to comment below and let us know what you think of the video – please be brutally honest!
Written Instructions:
All you need to get started with Google Analytics is a GMail account. If your business uses the Google applications suite and you have a business e-mail address hosted by Google that will work too. To sign up for Google Analytics complete the following steps:
- Go to the Google Analytics home page and login by entering your regular Google (or corporate) credentials and clicking “Sign In”.
- On the next screen, click the “Sign Up” button.
- On the screen after that, enter: 1) The address of the first website you’d like to track with Google Analytics. 2) Under “Account Name” enter a “nickname” that you can use to refer to this site within your Google Analytics dashboard. 3) Your country and 4) Your time zone.
- Then verify that everything is correct, and click “Continue”.
- On the following screen, simply complete the first name, last name, and country fields, and then again click “continue”.
- Read through the Google Analytics Terms of Service.
- If you agree to them, click the checkbox indicating your agreement and then click “Create New Account” button.
- Account setup is complete!
- (Optional) Copy/Paste your custom Google Analytics tracking code for insertion into your website, e-mail the tracking code to someone, or continue on to your Google Analytics dashboard.
Read More
Ten Reasons to Switch to Google Apps
Google Apps Logo
At DBS we’re pretty excited about the Google Apps productivity suite. In fact, we use it every single day. Here are ten reasons to join the three million other businesses running Google Apps.
- Gain the productivity, collaboration, and communication capabilities of a large enterprise at a small business price.
- No hardware to buy, maintain, or upgrade. Ever.
- No complicated or expensive software licensing. $50 per user per year.
- Provide employees secure remote access to corporate email, calendar, documents, and software.
- Mandatory SSL connections and additional security safeguards keep your data safe.
- Enable users to collaborate on project documents in real-time from anywhere in the world.
- Free up your IT staff to work on other strategic projects.
- Rely on Google’s geographical data center redundancy and 99.9% uptime SLA.
- Gain free access to 24x7x365 live technical support.
- Preserve your current technology investments with integration tools like Google Cloud Connect.
Read More
Putting your Business on the Map with Google Places
A study by Pew Internet reported last year that fifty-eight percent of Americans research products and services online before buying. That means it’s more important than ever to increase your business’ online visibility and the chance that local consumers can find it. One simple way to do this is by maintaining a free Google Places page for your business.
Google Places is like a super-charged version of the Yellow Pages. Integrated into Google Maps (and by extension regular Google search results), it not only contains a business’ name, address, and phone number but also its location on a map, pictures, hours of operation, user reviews, and more.
Where does all this information come from? The reviews are pulled from all over the internet, including popular sites like Yelp.com, UrbanSpoon.com, and CitySearch.com. Some basic information can be filled in by the public but most of the details should come from you – the business owner!
To begin, search Google Maps for your business. Once you find it, click on the the light blue “More Info” link to arrive at your Google Places page. To begin editing, click the “Business Owner” link, follow the prompts, and you’ll be able to begin work on your business’ profile. For maximum visibility, make sure you fill out every section possible, including business hours, payment methods, and the types of services your business offers. Also, don’t forget to upload some pictures related to the products or services you offer.
Once you’ve completed your business’ profile and saved all the changes, Google will mail you a postcard with the steps required to validate the information. But what to do after you’ve setup and validated your site? Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Send your happiest customers a link to your Places page and ask them to review you.
- Run a special promotion on your Places page using the “offer” feature.
- Purchase Google Tags to highlight your business and make it stand out over the competition.
- Monitor your page to see what people are saying about your business.
- Print a QR code to display at your business to help your customers find and rate you online.
- Check your page’s interaction statistics to see how many people have seen and acted on your Places page and offers.
Have we left anything out? Have you found another way to use Google Places to add value to your business? If so, leave a comment here and tell us about it! Otherwise, check out this article by the Google SMB Blog for some more tips on creating an effective presence on Google Places!
Read More