Is your website effective? Truly answering this question may seem like a difficult task. Well, thanks to those at Google, it can actually be quite easy. Google Analytics is an online service that provides you with the digital analytics tools necessary to understand your website performance. Data is collected from your website and converted into reports in Google Analytics, making it easier to understand how your website is performing and how it can be improved. To understand how Google Analytics can help you, let’s look at five of its benefits.
1. It’s All Free
Want a powerful tool that can help improve the effectiveness of your website and the success of your business? Use Google Analytics.
Want to better understand all that Google Analytics has to offer? Take the online courses on Google Analytics for Beginners & Advanced Google Analytics.
Want to prove you know your stuff? Get certified in Google Analytics.
How much does it all cost? Nothing. It’s all free, so why not give it a try!
2. Understanding Your Audience
One of the most important parts of running a successful business is knowing who your target audience is and how to best reach them. Google Analytics gives you the tools to understand the demographics of your website visitors. It can tell you how many people are coming to your site, what geographic location they are visiting from, what age they are, and even what their gender is.
Google analytics can provide you with a surplus of helpful information on the visitors coming to your website. With this information, you can decide things such as who your target audience should be, how you can customize content on your site to best reach your target audience, and you can even determine the location of your next marketing campaign based on where in the world visitors are coming from.
3. Understanding Traffic to Your Site
Google Analytics can actually show you how visitors are getting to your site. Traffic may come from paid advertisements, search engine results, links from other sites, email marketing campaigns, or by visitors directly typing in your site’s URL into their web browser. This information can tell you what sources are bringing the most traffic and help you decide what methods are working or not working to drive users to your site. If you notice a particular ad is performing poorly, you may decide to drop the ad and invest more resources into other forms of campaigns.
4. User Behavior on Your Site
This may be one of the most helpful tools in Google Analytics. You can check anything from what the most visited pages are on your site, to which pages people are landing on and leaving without any interaction (also called “Bounce Rate”). The Behavior reports in Google Analytics give you an incredible overview of the effectiveness of each page of your site. If your home page has an unusually high bounce rate, it may mean the page isn’t catching visitors’ attention and the design and content needs to be changed. Utilizing Behavior reports can help you to tweak different aspects of your website in order to create the best user experience that will keep visitors coming to your site, and staying on your site for longer.
5. Setting Up Goals
Goals are an essential way to track the effectiveness of your business strategy and marketing campaigns. In Google Analytics, you can set up website goals, and data will be tracked to determine how often those goals are being completed. A goal is a completed activity on your site, and is also known as a conversion.
An example of a conversion on an ecommerce site is a completed purchase. Not only can Google Analytics track the number completed purchases, but it can also track how many users drop out during each step of the purchasing process. This can be helpful because you can determine how to keep users moving through the purchasing process, or if 100% of users are dropping out once they get to Billing Information, you may conclude that something is wrong with the Billing Information forum.
You should also compare various marketing campaigns for your site to determine which are the most successful and generating the most conversions. This can help you to fine tune your marketing and business strategy in order to achieve your goals.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful digital analytics tools available and above are just a few of its benefits. There really are endless ways in which Google Analytics can help you optimize the effectiveness of your website, and the best part is, it’s all free. So, connect your websites to Google Analytics and start asking yourself, is my website effective?
Visit Google Analytics now to create a free account and start collecting your website data.