If you are a business owner, you know the importance of an online presence for your company. Even if you don’t sell your products online, you need to create brand awareness through marketing and advertising to build a strong and positive reputation. Simply creating a website is not enough for this endeavour. To make your efforts more effective, utilize Google Analytics for big benefits for your business!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the world’s biggest freemium (free and paid options) web analytics solution. It provides information about web traffic of websites, apps and offline channels. It offers a suite of options to help owners improve their online presence and target their specific audiences.
What are the Benefits of Google Analytics?
- Improve marketing campaigns to make them more effective
- Improve website usability by tracking visitor patterns
- Learn the demographics of your target audience
- Learn which sources provide the best return on your investment
- Connect with your customers by creating valuable content
How Does Google Analytics Work?
To start reaping the benefits of this solution, follow these steps:
- Sign up for a Google Analytics account here. You can also register using your Google+ account, if you have one.
- Set up a property, a website or app whose data you want to track here. You can add up to 50 properties under one account.
- Add the tracking ID code and/ or the JavaScript tracking-code snippet Google Analytics will provide you to the property to start tracking results. Use this for help in finding your codes, and install it on every single page of your website.
- Set up Site Search, which will track and report what users search for on your site.
- Configure user management by managing user permissions for your marketing, graphic designers and PR teams (if applicable). You can grant some of them access to simply view the data, while others can make changes affecting your account.
- Configure what Google Analytics tracks by focusing on where the audience clicks on your site; these can be links, videos, photos, etc.
- Set up goals to monitor if/ when your objectives are met. Goals will let you know when a purchase has been made, a newsletter signup has been received or a link has been clicked. Goals are crucial to evaluating the success of your campaigns.
How to Read Google Analytics Results
Once you setup your Google Analytics account, you view the Audience Overview report for each property you had added. You will be able to view traffic results based on specific date ranges, or compare one day, week, month or year to another. Hovering over certain parts of the report will provide you with more information on each section.
Under the metrics, Google Analytics provides top ten results for countries, languages, browsers, etc. that characterize your audience. Clicking on the report will also provide additional information, such as the parts of the country.
There are many other paid, premium features on Google Analytics which can help you make better business decisions. If you need help investing in these solutions, IOU Financial can help! We offer small business loans in just 24-48 hours!
