What does it cost?
The basic service is completely free and is suitable for most businesses. There is a paid version of Google analytics available also.
What can it track?
It is a useful tool in that it can provide essential data which companies can use in their marketing campaigns.
These include:
Real time traffic
You will be able to analyse visitors who are on your website in real time. This is very useful if your business is shown on television or on another media platform, how it is performing as people are watching the advertisements or the programme.
Audience
This tool allows you to see the amount of visitors that visit your website, where they are located, what browsers they use, whether they access your website using mobile or desktop devices and their behaviour on-line.
Traffic Sources:
This will help you in choosing your inbound marketing activities as the data can tell you where your visitors arrive on the site from. This is useful if you have a paid website link on a 3rd party website and you need to see how successful the campaign is. This section will also tell you how successful your organic traffic (SEO) results are performing, your adwords, email campaigns and how important your social media platforms are in driving traffic to your website.
Content:
The content section tells you what your most visited web pages are, including your landing pages for your website and a visitor flow map to discover how your visitors view your website. This is excellent for planning what webpages you should edit and/or to add content to as well as improving your call to actions.
Important data from your analytics
As well as the above, key information that I have discovered over the years which will assist you in generating more leads or sales from your website are the following:
Average time on your site
If you can get this figure up to and over 4 minutes it will greatly improve your conversion rates. To achieve this, you must use the data above to improve the content, the navigation flow and provide information for what your target audience are looking for and/or cannot get elsewhere.
Bounce rate
This can be confusing for a lot of businesses but the easiest way to explain it is if someone goes into a retail store and leaves straight away as if it was not the shop they were looking for. In this case, the bounce rate on your website will be close to 100% which is a poor rating. However if a person goes into the store, browses and purchases a product the bounce rate is 100% (excellent). You should try to keep the bounce rate to about 30% and work on improving your site to keep this figure consistent.
Call to action page views
Keep a record of the number of people who go to your call to action pages by either checking figures in the content section or add conversion goals. By using this simple technique you know how many people visit the contact us page, the purchase page, your location map etc. If you increase this figure, sale leads will also increase.
How to add Google Analytics to your website?
Adding Google analytics is simple, however it depends on your website. Your website developer can assist you but ensure that you create the account on your gmail/google apps account so that you have complete ownership on your analytics and not your web developer/digital marketer.
Once you create an analytics account, you will receive a snippet of code that must be added to every page on your website above or below the </body> code. You can find all the answers from Google directly here but if you wish, Finn Media can assist you in this process or manage your website objections, get in touch with us today.
Other website Analytics
There are other companies who also offer this if you want an alternative to Google.
Piwik analytics
We would love you to share your thoughts on Google analytics below or if you have any questions, fill in the comment box.