Izzy James
Digital Marketing
If you were a shop owner, you’d no doubt be watching the flow of your customers around your shop, moving stands and products to high visibility areas, and making improvements to your range and shop accessibility based on what you observe. This is no different when you own a website – just because it’s a digital medium doesn’t make it any less important to see what is going on. In fact, because it’s digital we can be more precise with our observations.
For example, if someone visits a physical shop location, you’d need to ask them if you wanted to know how they knew about your shop and found you. If someone visits your website, statistics can tell you exactly where they found you from, whether it be an advert or Search Engine search, and you can also see how many people from each source have made a purchase.
Even if you’re not interested in improving your website visitor behaviour flow, you should definitely be monitoring the results of any advertising you’re running, so you’re not wasting your money on methods that are not working.
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used tools for gathering statistics with over 50 million websites using it around the world.
In this blog, we will be talking all about Google Analytics and why you should be using it.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google that is free to anyone with a Google account. It can be used to collect, monitor, analyse and report on data from your website. Not only can you track how users act across your website, but you can also see how they landed on your website, whether that be from organic search results, social media, paid ads, or other websites.
Analytics is split into 5 main sections:
Real-time – this section monitors and reports on data from your website as it occurs. For example, you can track users on your website within a specific moment, which can be excellent for testing tracking and also releases of new functions, information, or products that you know will involve a rush and you want to keep track of how it goes to track any issues.
Audience – this helps you look at who your customers are and includes a range of demographics for them. This can help identify who is engaging most, who is struggling to connect with your site, and how/where you need to improve along with where you might want to focus your marketing efforts.
Acquisition – this section looks at how your customers get to your website and where the majority of your traffic comes from. For example, this could be from social media, emails, ads, and organic searches. This is invaluable for monitoring the success of your various marketing methods.
Behaviour – this explains the behaviour of the customers on your website i.e, what they do, what pages they visit, and how long they stay. This is a useful metric when determining how to increase engagement and conversions.
Conversions – this is where any actions you want a customer to take are tracked, for example, a phone call, submitted contact form, email link clicks, or purchases. This allows you to see how your customers are interacting with your website and can show detailed information on revenue along with products bought and conversation rates, allowing you to get solid information on your ROI and success of the site and marketing.
How does it work?
You simply need to place one block of code into your website header (something your website developers may have to do for you). This code then records the activities of users across your website and sends all the information to the Google Analytics server. It places cookies on people’s computers as well, to register their sessions, so it knows when a visitor is a returning visitor having been on the site before.
Once the tracking code is placed, you can log in to the Google Analytics website and view your data.
Why should you be using it?
Simply put – if you’re running a website, paying for its hosting, spending time updating it and adding content, and spending money on marketing, you’re wasting that money and time if you’re not monitoring its results. You can’t guess outcomes; you need solid data on what is successful and what is not working.
At the very least just seeing your top sources of traffic and top pages will show you what is currently working and what pages on your website need more attention. At the most you will get detailed information on which of your marketing methods are bringing in profit, and which are failing to, enabling you to really use your website budget efficiently and build your customer base.
If you want more information on anything we mentioned in this blog, please contact our team today and we can discuss Google Analytics with you.