After investing so much time and money in your new website, how do you measure the ROI (Return on Investment)? How do you capture more leads?
The best way to manage your website’s progress is to add Google Analytics to your website. This powerful data-analysis program is installed on over 10 million websites around the world.
According to Google, Google Analytics “provides powerful digital analytics for anyone with a web presence, large or small.” On Mashable, Google Analytics is described as a system that “makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyze this data. It’s a powerful, free tool that can answer a variety of questions for a wide range of users.”
Here are 5 specific reasons you should be using Google Analytics today:
1 – Analytics tracks how people get to your website.
Analytics tells you where your visitors are coming from (a Google search, a paid ad, Facebook, a visit on your Yelp profile, a link from a blog post) and which pages on your site they are landing on (homepage, contact us page, about us page, etc.). This information can help you take advantage of these traffic sources and optimize the pages customers are landing on. For example, you can measure the effectiveness of an advertising or social media campaign’s ability to drive people to your website to make a purchase decision.
2 – Analytics tells you where your website needs improvement.
Each page on your website contributes to your ultimate goal: creating new customers. Analytics can tell you how well each page contributes to your lead acquisition and which pages need optimization.
“Funneling resources to features that aren’t captivating users is clearly not a smart business move, and Google Analytics can help you avoid making that mistake,” writes BusinessInsider.com
To illustrate the quote above, if you have an important page that describes your products and services, Analytics can shed light on its performance:
Analytics can tell you how long people spend on the page.
If people are only spending a few seconds on the page, maybe you need to work on your copy, add a few pictures, or have the page custom designed for higher impact.
Analytics can tell you how much traffic an individual page receives.
If an important page is only getting a small amount of traffic, maybe you can drive more traffic by placing a graphical call to action in your header or sidebar that links to this page.
By tracking your website’s activity using data points that are important to your bottom line, you are able to improve your results and create more business.
3 – Analytics helps you keep up with Google’s search engine changes.
Google as a search entity has changed a lot since its inception. In recent years, it has aggressively updated its search algorithm with the goal to provide the best possible search results for each user.
Google’s updates are named after animals: Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird to name a few. These updates penalize websites that try to rank highly using cheap tricks rather than offer useful information to website visitors.
Analytics allows you to stay in the game by tracking increases and decreases in your traffic from search engines, as well as other signals that show if your website has been affected by an algorithmic update.
BONUS: another good tool to use for these updates is Google Webmaster Tools. We’ll tell you more about this in a future post.
4 – Analytics tells you how many of your visitors use mobile phones
Users increasingly choose to view sites through their mobile devices. According to Cisco’s study of mobile traffic, mobile traffic grew by 81% in 2013! In 2013 alone, 406 million new smartphones were connected.
This explosion in mobile traffic means that your website must cater to the mobile user. By using analytics with our clients, we share statistics on exactly how much traffic they receive from mobile devices.
One client received nearly a third of his traffic from mobile! We advised him to update the website with a responsive design so that the website would display in an optimized format for desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. Traffic and phone calls increased and more people are filling out his contact forms.
You can learn if your website needs a similar responsive upgrade, as well.
5 – Analytics has no monthly fee!
Google does not charge for this amazing analytical tool. If you can’t install it yourself, get your Webmaster to install it today.
Google Analytics is the industry standard for web analytics and is essential to the management and optimization of your website. Integrating this system will help you to gain even more from your website investment. You can learn more about analytic optimization from our newsletter or by contacting us today.
