How to use Google Analytics
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is essential to understand your potential customers behaviour once they have landed on your website. Utilising this fantastic tool, could help you generate more leads and sell more products.
Crucially, Google Analytics will tell you what is really happening on your website. Often when comparing this to what you think is happening, you will find some striking differences.
Why do I need Google Analytics?
Websites require investment and long-term commitment, if they are going to be an effective tool for you to grow your business. Google’s algorithms are always changing and understanding how to effectively spend your budget to get the results you desire can be challenging.
Google Analytics attempts to reduce this challenge through helping you learn what’s working, what isn’t and why. This knowledge, based on fact, not assumption can ensure you invest your time and money wisely.
What benefits will my business see from Google Analytics?
Google Analytics will allow you to see at a glance:
- The number of visitors to your website.
- How many are landing on the website and staying to explore further.
- What pages they are visiting.
- The amount of time they spend on those pages.
- What marketing channels your visitors are visiting from.
- Aside from the above, Google Analytics offers a wealth of data and statistics that will support the growth of your website and business.
How do I use Google Analytics?
When measuring the success of your website using Google Analytics, there are several things to keep an eye on. Here are 3 things you can begin looking out for:
Where is my website attracting traffic from?
Google Analytics allows you to track user visits from your marketing campaigns, including:
- Email Marketing
- Social Media
- Google Ads
Understanding where potential customers are visiting from and analysing their behaviour once on your website, will begin to give you some understanding around the quality of your marketing campaigns and website.
Is my website attracting potential customers?
Once customers have begun visiting your website, attention turns to converting these customers into sales or leads. However, without quantifying the quality of the traffic through their behaviour it’s very difficult to know whether you’re attracting target customers or people that aren’t likely to convert.
Analytics allows you to view the amount of people landing on specific pages, how long they spend on a page and if they dig deeper into the website or better still, convert to a sale.
If your Google Ads campaign is delivering a high volume of traffic but visitors aren’t converting into leads or sales, you could begin by reviewing the amount of time spent on the page they’re being directed to*. If we find most people are spending less than 10 seconds on the page, we would begin assessing the advert copy, to ensure it marries up with the page they’re visiting and that people aren’t expecting to see a very different offer from the advert that has been designed.
*(psst, we call this a landing page)
How does seasonality effect my business?
Seasonality effects businesses both offline and online. Having complete visibility of your websites performance throughout the year through Analytics, will allow you to:
- Increase your advertising spend during busier times of the year to maximise profits.
- Create seasonal content and view the performance of this. Any content that performs well could be improved the following year and used more readily, across more marketing channels.
- Understand the performance of your website this year, versus last year. This will provide you with a more accurate reflection than making comparisons month-on-month, as you are measuring performance within the same season, a year on.
If you would like us to analyse your websites performance using Google Analytics, along with producing recommendations to improve your sales and lead generation free of charge, get in touch here.
What else do I need to know?
Although we would always recommend starting with Google Analytics, there are a variety of other marketing tools that can be used to further understand your potential customers behaviour.
One such tool is Hotjar, where you can record and review the actions your audience are taking when on your website. For example, if you review a page and find they are only scrolling 50% of the way down, you may consider:
- Improving your content to provide them with a more compelling reason to keep reading.
- Improving the layout of your content to make it easier for them to read and extract the key points.
- Moving your Call to Action higher up the page, as your audience might make decisions quickly or prefer to talk to somebody, as they don’t know what they want.
At Need to Know Marketing we love providing information for SME’s so they can grow. We also understand this work can be time consuming and difficult to begin with. To assist you, we provide a free of charge one hour consultation, where we have an open discussion about your business objectives and what you’re looking to achieve.
Following the consultation we will provide you with a marketing strategy, advising how we recommend meeting your business objectives through marketing. If you are interested in knowing the cost of our services, you can use our calculator as a guide.
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
Walt Disney knew telling a story is always always easier with pictures. It crosses all barriers. The best story tellers are always the best at engaging their audience.