Why Is It Important To Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that every business owner should be using and incorporating into their marketing efforts on a daily basis. Below we look at why it’s important to use Google Analytics and some key things to look out for and consider when using this powerful tool.
Why is it important to use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics tracks every interaction that a user has on your website. What this allows you to do is monitor the performance of your site while also collecting data that will inform you on who your most valuable users and customers are.
Benchmark, measure and test.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This statement is imperative for all things in life, and is essentially what Google Analytics was designed to do. Analytics allows you to measure the performance and impact of your marketing efforts, benchmark goals and see the history of your website in an easy digestible user friendly way. It takes the guesswork out of success measures as you can see which blog post, Instagram ad, or paid Google Ads campaign generated the most value for your business. Because it is so measurable, Google Analytics gives you the ability to test new ad creatives or content and measure the impact of each, essentially taking the guesswork out of what is working and what isn’t. You will soon become a data-led marketing department, instead of just a marketing department.
Customer Segments
If you don’t know who is coming to your website, how do you know who your customers are? Google Analytics gives you the ability to find out who your most valuable customers are by age, gender, location, device, and interests. This combined with finding out what exactly they did on your website begins to develop some strong marketing I.P for your company.
The most important Google Analytics Metrics?
This is a flawed question most people endeavour to answer. Every industry, segment, and business has different metrics that are used as the measure of success. The way to approach what metrics you should measure is to reverse engineer what your business goals are and align Google Analytics from there. For example if you are trying to newsletter sign-ups, this should be the main thing you measure, from here you can track how many users you need per day to get a sign-up and so on. Tracking metrics such as time on site are only useful if you care about people being on your site for extended periods of time. For certain company’s, spending 5 minutes on your website is actually a bad sign of user experience and something you should address.
How to set up Google Analytics?
Google Analytics set-up is relatively simple. All you need to do is build an account on https://analytics.google.com and then put the code snippet it gives you into the header section of your websites html. From here Google will do the rest and you can log back into Google Analytics and start to gather data to benchmark and inform your site’s online performance. Once set-up begin to make goals to measure key insights on your website such as sales, engagement and sign-ups.
Summary
Whether you have a blog, passion project, offline business or ecommerce store. Early on in your business life cycle Google Analytics should be one of the first things you implement on your website. From then on, seek guidance to set-up the required metrics you want to measure and benchmark. Use this tool to guide the success of your sentiment, brand and marketing efforts to allow you to make more informed business decisions.
