Why you need to learn Google Analytics
Ursula Somers - 14 January 2015
Building a great website is just the start of your online success story. Once your site is up and running the next step is to make sure that it is as effective as possible, and that it is attracting the right type of customers to the right pages. To help you understand how your site is working it is really important to have an analytical tool which can enable you to drill down into the details of your website traffic and customers. After all it might be great that you are getting 200 hits to your site each day – but not if your hits are coming from the U.S. and you are a shop based in Hertfordshire who wants to attract local clients! That’s why you need to learn Google Analytics which can be an essential tool in helping you to really make the most of your online presence.
What is Google Analytics and what can it tell me about my website?
Google Analytics is an easily installed tool which tracks the statistics behind the traffic to your website. You can get a simple version for free by downloading it from the Google site.
Google Analytics can tell you a great deal about both how your website works and how your customers work too. Once you have installed it on your site you will be able to see a data dashboard that will tell you details about how many people visit your site during a given time period, where those people are in the UK or in the world and when they are using your site. You will also be able to see how people interact with your page – so you can see where customers move to from the home page and what the bounce rate is on each page. You can even see how long they stay on a particular page for.
While Google Analytics is extremely useful, it is not the most intuitive of tools. So to make the most of it, you’ll need some training to get the hang of it. Find out more about Wagada’s Google Analytics Training.
How can I make the most of Google Analytics?
To make the most of Google Analytics it is a good idea to decide on the key priorities for your website and online customers, and then use Google Analytics to make sure that your website is achieving these targets. You can look for peaks and troughs of customer hits when you have a specific marketing campaign running – and you can also see where your hits are coming from and therefore tell if your site is attracting the right demographic for your product. You can also use Google Analytics to find out how engaging your site is for potential clients and what the customer journey through your website looks like.
You’ll want to set up Google Webmaster Tools at the same time, and link the two, in order to get the most of the SEO data available in the tools.
You can even link Google Analytics in with any Google Adwords campaigns you may have running which will enable you to see how successful they are, to compare campaigns and decide what changes you need to make to ensure that your campaigns are as effective as possible.
So you can see just how important it is to take the time to learn Google Analytics and why it can make a real difference to your online marketing campaigns.
