Improve Your Website’s Effectiveness with Google Analytics

Do You Monitor Your Website Traffic?

It seems like a no-brainer, but a large number of firms have no idea how their website is performing and whether it’s an effective marketing tool. Gathering this detailed website traffic data and using it has become an essential part of online marketing.

Google Analytics Makes it Easy

Your hosting company may provide a basic web statistics system as part of your monthly plan, but few of these tools provide as much detailed information as Google Analytics. If you’re not already using it you should look into installing on your site. You’d be hard-pressed to find another system that offers such a comprehensive breakdown of all your website traffic in a very user-friendly format.

How Did People Get to Your Site?

Knowing the number of people that have visited your site is important, but what’s equally important is knowing how they got there. Having this information will let you gauge the success of your marketing and let you know if the money you’ve spent on search engine optimization and advertising is being used effectively.

Track Your Visitor Behavior

See what people have done from the moment they visited your site to the time they left it. You can see whether people have accessed your site from the home page or if their first interaction was with another part of the site such as a products/services page, a targeted landing page, or your blog.

You can also view the user flow which actually shows you how visitors clicked through your site from one page to the next. You can also see how long they were on any one page and where they left the site.

Where are Your Visitors Located?

You might be offering your product or service to a specific geographic area. In this case it’s important to know the location of your visitors. Google Analytics will track the country, region and the city of all visitors to your site. This can be extremely useful when determining where to spend your advertising dollars.

Desktop vs. Mobile?

With the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets it’s become important to offer a consistent user experience across platforms. Google Analytics can tell you how many people have accessed your site with mobile devices versus traditional desktop computers. It can even determine which specific devices that they’re using such as iPhone, Android or Blackberry. Having access to this information can let you tailor you content to your potential customers. You can even have special offers or content that’s visible to specific platforms.

What’s the Cost?

One of the greatest things about Google Analytics is the cost. It’s completely free! Considering the invaluable data that it provides, there’s really no reason that you shouldn’t be using this incredible tool to gauge the effectiveness of your website.