5 Questions to ask yourself why you need Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free application which can give you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. I know some people think that statistics are boring, but we find them invaluable as they accurately report data which indicates whether or not we’re getting a bang for our marketing bucks (or for you intellectual nerds out there, our “return on investment”, a.k.a. ROI).
Google Analytics can provide more statistical data than you can possibly imagine and delivers whatever reports you request for a defined time frame. This article cannot begin to cover all data and reports which can be retrieved through Google Analytics. To whet your appetite, do you know that your visitors don’t always start out on your web site’s “home page”? They can and do enter your web site on any one of your individual web pages. Where they start is called a “landing page”, and that depends on a number of variables:
- For instance, do visitors find your website through an Internet search engine (if so, which one); or through a referral link on another web site (if so, which one); or do they type your web site address directly into their Internet browser (if so, which one)?
- What about when visitors leave your web site, do you know which page(s) they exit from most often? Would that help you to devise a way to keep them on your site?
- How about the geographic locations of your visitiors? Do you know where your traffic comes from? Could you benefit from reports on which city, state/province, and/or country your visitors come from?
- If you are sending out regular email campaigns, do you know if they actually contribute to increased traffic to your web site?
- What decisions might you make if you had reliable information about the effectiveness of each page of your web site? If you don’t have this information at hand, how will you make decisions you need to tweak your site?
To utilize Google Analytics you need to open a Google account (good news – it’s free) and you access the analytics program, enter your web site’s home page address, which creates a snippet of computer code, which you copy and paste into the code on your web site. It’s not all that difficult for those who maintain their own web sites, or you can ask your webmaster to do this for you. Once the code has been installed you can access your Google account reports at any time and as often as you like. We invite you to take the complete product tour of Google Analytics, by visiting their website at: http://www.google.com/analytics/product.html
We invite you to comment below. Do you agree with these five questions, or do you have more or different questions to contribute?
