Never Miss a Conversion: The Importance of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful website monitoring and analysis tools on the planet, offering a suite of tracking and reporting functions that allows website owners to find out all about who’s visiting their site. With exceptionally robust functionality, Google Analytics can give you a tremendous amount of information regarding how people are arriving at your site, how long they’re staying on your web pages, which pages resonate most with them, and how well your site is performing in terms of conversions.

Most businesses consider Google Analytics to be an essential tool in their marketing repertoire, and if you’re looking to expand or grow your business online based on actionable data, Google Analytics is an absolute must-have. Below are just a few examples of scenarios in which Google Analytics can provide invaluable insight for your business:

1. Acquisition Reporting

Let’s say that you have a flood of traffic coming to your site (and that’s a good thing), but you have no idea where your visitors are coming from! Using the acquisition reporting features of Google Analytics, you can find out how visitors and customers are arriving at your site by creating reports that detail traffic sources across mobile and desktop devices. You’ll be able to see if your main traffic comes from search engines, referral URLs, social media links, or otherwise. You can also customize your reports based on date ranges, so that you can compare traffic growth and trends over weeks or months.

2. Audience Reporting

If you’ve been itching to find out more about your audience, Google Analytics has more than 200 different metrics and dimensions that will help you narrow down the specific characteristics and demographics of your website visitors. You can pull reports that will give you a good composite sketch of what your audience looks like, including factors such as location, language, interests, devices, operating systems, etc.

3. Goals and Conversion Reporting

How can you tell if your conversion ratios are up to snuff? How can you know which business activities are producing the best conversion rates? Google Analytics is a marketer’s dream for these purposes–it gives you the ability to set goals and track conversions using a flexible reporting system based on your own particular business objectives.

Using the “Goals” feature in Google Analytics, you can measure how often your users complete certain actions, such as making a purchase, submitting a lead gen form, and so forth. Once your Goals are established, Google Analytics will then feed you critical performance information such as number of conversions, conversion rates, etc., for your website or mobile app. You can tailor these reports to fit your business objectives, and then identify and evaluate the visitor actions that are most likely to help you meet those goals.

4. E-Commerce Reporting

Maybe you run an e-commerce site, but you don’t have an effective method for identifying your most popular or best converting products. Which products would be the most profitable ones to promote in a pay-per-click or display advertising campaign? Or perhaps you’ve been noticing a high rate of shopping cart abandonment, but you’re not sure what the “sticking point” may be. Google Analytics provides you with various insights that enable you to better understand your customers’ behavior, including path to purchase, interest level by product, shopping cart usage, and shopping campaign performance.

5. Site Reporting

How do you know whether or not you’re offering a user experience that matches their preferences? Google Analytics offers tools such as Flow Visualization and In-Page Analytics that will show you the path that a visitor takes when they arrive on your site, as well as details regarding how they interact with each of the pages they visit. This will allow you to adjust your content and page elements in order to cater to the most prevalent tendencies of your target audience.

This is no “lightweight” application; Google Analytics provides you with a comprehensive set of tools and features that will help you better understand the performance of your website in hundreds of different ways. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of this virtually indispensable marketing tool, click here to begin the setup process, or get in touch with 2060 Digital to walk you through it, so that you never miss a conversion again!