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 business objective in mind when you designed your site or did you just decide to build a website because you knew 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 how visitors find your site –  Google Analytics details your website’s traffic sources, whether from Search (Google, etc), Referral (Visitor clicked a link to your site), Direct (user typed in your web address), or Campaign (Paid Advertisements via Google AdWords).
2. Find out where your visitors live – Not only which countries your visitors live in, but the individual cities as well.
3. Find out why visitors found your site – Discover which terms visitors enter in search engines in order to find your business.
4. Find out what parts of your site visitors like… and don’t – Find out how long people spend looking at each page on your site and which pages most often send visitors away to your competition.
5. Optimize goal conversion – Google Analytics provides a visualization of the entire “sales funnel” of your website so you can identify where in the online sales process your visitors are leaving.  This gives you the chance to optimize your conversion process.
6. Optimize Google AdWords – Google AdWords provides reports identifying which digital advertising campaigns yield the most cost-effective clicks; however, Google Analytics reveals which ad campaigns and keywords are yielding quality visits that actually result in conversions.
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 as well as the RoI of your online advertising campaigns.
8. Evaluate effectiveness of print and other traditional media – When creating multi-channel ad campaigns that drive traffic to your website you can use Google Analytics to analyze which channels and which 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 reports and dashboards to track and highlight the metrics most meaningful to your business.
10. It’s FREE –  That’s right, you can add all these capabilities to your website without any software to buy or subscription fees to pay.  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!