For every business and organization, it’s important to analyze your website. What are people reading? Where are people clicking? How are people finding your website?
The answers to all of these questions can help you increase your engagement rate and track effectiveness of campaigns.
Why should you use Google Analytics?
First of all, Google analytics is free! That’s right – Free! A world of data, statistics, charts, and graphs are available at your fingertips – you just have to know how to use and interpret them. While it may seem intimidating at first, once you get started, you will find that Google Analytics is user friendly and easy to pick up. Check out some of the things Google analytics can do!
Google analytics can help you:
- Track advertising effectiveness. Google analytics allows you to calculate a baseline average of how many website hits your website gets without any ads being run. You can then look at the number of hits (per day, week, or month) for the amount of time your ad was run and see how much your hits increased during your ad campaign.
- See how visitors are using your site. On the left-hand side under Audience, there is a Visitors Flow option. This shows you which pages your visitors use most and how they progress through your site.
- Gauge the effectiveness of your social media. Google Analytics tracks where visitors came from if they are referred to your site from somewhere else. If you or someone else posts a link to your site on Facebook or Twitter, for example, analytics tracks how many visitors to your site were referred from there. This option on the left under Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.
- See what area of the US/world your visitors are coming from. On the left under the Audience menu, there is a Demographics option that has a Location selection. When you click on this, a map of the world pops up, and when you mouse over locations, analytics tells you how many visitors to your site you had from each place.
My favorite feature?
One of my favorite menus is the Overview option under the Traffic Sources menu. This pulls up a page that shows you, in a pie chart, where your traffic is coming from. The percentages are broken down by search traffic, direct traffic, and referral traffic. Analytics also show you which key words were typed into search engines like Google and Ask that led visitors to your site. Very informative!
Google has an extremely helpful online user manual that you can check out when you are ready to get started. Happy analyzing!
- Grace