Do You Have Good Website Tracking?
If you’re not collecting data about your website, it is highly likely you will make incorrect decisions based on your intuition. The only way to make good business decisions is to use data and Google Analytics is a great place to start.
You may be a smart business person and have good instincts, but success will not be repeatable, and mistakes will happen that you don’t know how to fix. Using website tracking will help you avoid flying blind and help you make the best business decisions going forward.
We highly recommend that you use Google Analytics. The main reasons are that it works and it’s free. After all, Google is still the number one search engine. That, along with these other reasons, should lead you to install Google Analytics today.
Learn How People Find Your Website![google analytics]()
One of the most useful aspects of GA is the fact that you can see where people came from when they landed on the pages on your site. If you can see, for example, that you have a lot of people coming from an article you posted as a guest on a blog, you may want to ask to post more, or you may determine that the traffic is not converting so you can stop.
Know What They’re Looking at Most
When you can see behind the scenes what your audience is consuming most on your site and how they’re looking at it with heat maps, it’s like reading their mind. You can use that information to adjust and change to better appeal to the audience.
Learn Demographic Data Regarding Your Audience
You may be trying to attract single moms in their 30’s but look at your demographic data and find out something different. If that’s the case, you’ll know to adjust your content to attract your audience.
Leverage Popular Pages on Your Site
You can find out which pages are most popular on your site and use that info to market them more to get even more attention. Plus, you can use that information to create more pages like them.
Get Information to Use![]()
All the information you can gather can be used to improve. For example, let’s say you create a landing page and run ads to get more traffic. You can use GA to find out if the ads are working on getting traffic and then if the traffic is converting.
Track All Your Conversions
Using GA to track conversions is essential, it’s a little more work to set up, but it’s not hard if you follow their step-by-step directions. You can also find people demonstrating it on YouTube.com. And of course, you can always outsource.
Know What Content to Create
By using the data of what is really happening when your audience comes to your website, what they read, what they do, and who they are you can more easily come up with a content marketing plan for every stage of your audience’s buying cycle.
It Is Totally Free, and It’s Easy
Finally, Google Analytics is free. Because of this, there is no reason not to use it. Plus, Google is still the number one search engine, so any advice and information they provide are useful to get their attention.
As you can see, there are numerous reasons to install website tracking and to use Google Analytics specifically. It’s not hard to use, and you can follow their directions on installing it easily enough yourself. If you use self-hosted WordPress, you can even use a plugin. In fact, some of the plugins you already use may have integrated Google Analytics too.
Are You Making the Most of Google Analytics?
Google Analytics does a lot more than just count traffic. If you know how to use the data that you’re collecting, you can use GA to improve all aspects of your marketing from content marketing to product creation. Let’s look at some ways you can use Google Analytics. Don’t be afraid to try things and learn how to do it by simply following the directions provided in the Google Analytics Dashboard.
Set Up Your Dashboard Area
When you set up your GA account, you’ll want to set up your dashboard to display the most important data points that you want to see. The exciting thing is you can even create more than one dashboard, which is nice because you may want to focus on one metric over another, or you may want to look at your data in different ways.
Use Advanced Segments![]()
One way to look at data is to collect it based on segments just like you do in email marketing. So if you want to know which segments of your audience are answering your calls to action or converting to sales, you can set up the system to show you which segments are performing better so you can adjust your marketing.
Know Where Your High-Value Site Visitors are Originating
If you ever want to run social media or even Google Ads, you’ll be asked to choose the location of the audience you want to see the ads. If you don’t know who you’re serving, that’s hard to do. You can see where your visitors are coming from and which visitors are more likely to answer your CTAs using GA. Then use that information to improve your ads.
Analyze Site Searches
Use Google Analytics to set up a site search. You can then use the information you collect from what your visitors search for directly on your site. Those keywords they use can then be used to create more relevant content for them. You may even get amazing product ideas through the site searches.
See Where People Click Most
Using heat maps with GA, you can find out what your audience clicks on the most. This information is relevant because even if they’re not converting, you can follow the trail and figure out how you can insert more touchpoints for them to convert them. Plus, you can see which internal links are clicked the most and what isn’t. You may find you can eliminate some menu items or that you need to move some if the important things aren’t being clicked on.
Find Your Top Content![google analytics]()
Knowing which content on your site gets the most traffic can help you decide which content you should expand on and which content is not performing and can be eliminated or improved by using better SEO. Use GA to learn which content on your site:
- gets the most reads
- the most engagement
- generates the most sales or downloads or conversions
Analyze Abandoned Shopping Carts
Finding out if you have leaks at the point of sale due to your shopping cart set up is also something you can do with GA. Setting this up is more advanced in nature, but you can find step-by-step instructions on GA and also on YouTube.com.
Improving your shopping cart can increase sales exponentially, which is why this particular ability is so valuable.
Don’t be afraid of this technology. You cannot break your site using it. You may set it up wrong at first, but you won’t break something. Plus, it’s a lot simpler than your mind is telling you if you’ve never tried using GA. The learning curve is more than worth it, and you’ll be so glad you overcame this and implemented Google Analytics.
