If you own a website then you should be using it to generate more sales for your business. After all, what use is a website if it’s doing nothing to improve your bottom line? Google Analytics is a must-have tool that gives you access to powerful insights, which you can use to optimise your digital marketing efforts. In this article, we’ll take you through the top 5 benefits of integrating Google Analytics to your website.
It’s free
First and foremost, Google Analytics is a 100% free tool. Therefore, integrating Google Analytics to your website won’t have any impact on the cost of running your business. Google does offer Analytics 360 for a fee, though unless you’re an enterprise-level business with over 10 million monthly website visitors then this is something that you don’t need to worry about. In fact, you can’t even buy Analytics 360. You need to go through an interview process with Google to see if your fit for their product, kind of like buying a Ferrari.
Track how people find your website
Digital marketing is playing an ever-increasingly important role to overall business success. Now, businesses (including your direct competitors) are using multiple digital channels to generate sales and create overall growth. Common digital marketing channels include, but are not limited to social media, pay per click ads, search engine optimisation, email marketing and display advertising. With Google Analytics, you can see exactly where your website visitors are coming from, right down to the individual Facebook ad (social media) or Google ad variation (pay per click).
See what people do on your website
Once you see how people are arriving on your website, you might be interested in finding out what they do once they get there. This is where the Google Analytics Behaviour section comes in. You can use this section to track which pages website visitors click through to, which pages have high/low engagement rates, which pages have high exit rates etc. Overall, you will be able to gain insight to what’s working on your website and what isn’t. From there, you can improve your website design or content to get your website visitors to engage more.
Gain insight into user profiles & interests
Often, knowing how many people are visiting your website is not enough. You want to find out a little bit more about who they are and what they’re interested in. For example, are your website visitors predominantly male or female? What age group do most of your website fall into? What are your website visitors predominantly interested in i.e. news and politics? You can use this information to create more effective marketing campaigns aimed at the gender, age group and customer profile of website visitors that engage with your website the most.
Find out what the most popular pages on your website are
Inevitably, some pages on your website will have more traffic than others. Using the All Pages report in Google Analytics, you can find out which pages users visit most, the average time spent on those pages, the bounce rate of those pages, as well as the exit rate of those pages. This information is useful if, for example, you have content that is ranking highly on Google, but isn’t converting website visitors to paying customers. Google Analytics will help you identify this problem, which you can then work on resolving.
Track the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns
Having hundred, thousands, or even millions of monthly website visitors is great, but the stats are useless if your marketing efforts aren’t converting your website visitors into paying customers. By setting up Goals, you can track important events such as sales, newsletter subscriptions and enquiries. From there, you can attribute these goals to individual marketing campaigns and track the effectiveness of each. Thus, you will be able to optimise your digital marketing efforts to achieve maximum ROI.
