Back in 2006 Google came out with Google Analytics. The idea of this free tool was to make website tracking available to everyone. And not just ho-hum web tracking. We are talking quality web tracking. It’s still out there but for some reason most small businesses I run into aren’t using this great tool. Here are 3 quick reasons why you should be.
- It will help you make website improvements. Many businesses wonder whether their website is doing its job. Google Analytics can tell you. In fact, it can tell you what pages are the most successful and what pages are not cutting it. It can tell you how long people are spending on each page. If you have products listed, it will tell you which are the most popular. Trying to decide what revisions your webpage needs? I recommend you don’t start revising until you’ve taken a hard look at your analytics.
- It will help you better understand Google Adwords. I have seen way too many people run Google Adwords campaigns without really tracking the results. Adwords can be watched through a dashboard in the program itself, but it can also be monitored via Google Analytics. While the Adwords dashboard gives you the information you need for managing those ads, Google Analytics will give you the bigger picture of your ad traffic. It can show you how many visitors you are getting from all your ad campaigns versus organic traffic sources, which is an important metric everyone should be watching.
- It will assist you in planning your marketing goals. Want to double the traffic to your site by a certain date? Want to increase the organic traffic you are getting through SEM? Whatever it is that you are reaching for as a business owner, Google Analytics can help you monitor it.
And the final, unofficial, reason you should employ Google Analytics? It’s fun. Ok, so not go-to-Disneyland-fun, but it is interesting and fun to measure the results in a geeky-statistics-can-be-fun kind of a way. So go ahead and sign up, step back, and analyze.
