Why should you use Google Analytics?

‘How often do you look at your Google Analytics reports?’ The presenter posed this question at a webinar on search engine optimisation. We selected from multi-choice answers on our screens and the results were revealing. Most people were at the ‘hardly ever’ or ‘never’ end of the spectrum!

So, why would a business owner want to look at Google Analytics?

Because it can provide you with data that is part of the bigger practice of ‘knowing your numbers’. If we only tracked end results in our businesses, we might be in for some surprises at the end of the quarter or the year. So we measure other things to tell us whether we are on course, and adjust our activities accordingly.

We can measure offline marketing activities; for example, we might track the number of sales conversations we’ve had, and the number of proposals sent. In the same way, Google Analytics tells us how we are going with our online marketing activities. Making better decisions about future marketing is the link between analytics and growth.

Start by asking yourself why you have a website and what roles it plays in your sales and marketing. Ask yourself the same questions for your other online channels.

Think about the journey people take from becoming aware of you, to then engaging with your brand or content, then purchasing from you. It may help if you draw a diagram or flowchart showing the customer journey and how it maps to your online channels. This will help you to see what you need to measure.

How do people become aware of you and find your website?

• Social media? Paid advertising? Organic search? Referred from other websites?

Can they take actions that indicate interest in your products or services?

• Download resources? View sales pages? Join your mailing list? Book a free consultation?

Can people buy from you on your website?

These are the journeys that you need to measure. Well-chosen metrics will tell you, at a glance, which channels and activities are the best contributors to awareness, engagement and new business.

In summary, the first step is to decide what you want to measure that will be a meaningful business indicator.

You could just connect Google Analytics to your website and leave it at that – but you would get little value from doing that.

The indicators that you choose to measure are not always tracked by default because every website is different. Therefore, your chosen indicators should be set up as ‘goals’ in Google Analytics. You could learn how to do this yourself, or get a web analytics expert to help you with this.

You’ll also need to configure your account to enrich your reporting, by doing things like:

• Link Google Search Console to Google Analytics
• Link Google Ads to Google Analytics
• Turn on ‘Advertising Reporting Features’ and ‘Demographics and Interest Reporting’

If you use email as one of your marketing channels, and those emails include links to your website, you should adopt a system to tag these links, so that individual email campaigns can be differentiated in analytics reports. Most email service providers will offer a way to do this.

When you implement Google Analytics, you may be advised to implement Google Tag Manager as well. If you are serious about measuring your online marketing, this is a good idea – Google Tag Manager makes it much easier to track goals and ecommerce without needing your web developer every time you want to track something new. Like Google Analytics, it is a free tool.

If you are fairly new to Google Analytics and haven’t yet got your account customised and optimised, my article ‘How to read Google Analytics’ offers some suggestions for where to look to make connections between data and business value.
In this article, I suggest:

• The Channels report (found under Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels) to see how people are arriving at your website.
• The Search Console reports, especially ‘Queries’ and ‘Landing Pages’ (found under Acquisition > Search Console) to show what people were looking for when they found your website through organic search.
• The Location Report (found under Audiences > Geo > Location) to show where your users are located.
• When you have your goals configured in Google Analytics, the Top Conversion Paths Report (found under Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels) is really useful. It will tell you which of your marketing activities are leading to valuable actions on your website.

Once you know which business indicators you want to track, you will want to do this easily and regularly. You will be ready for custom reports, which answer your specific business questions.

There are a couple of ways you can go about this. In Google Analytics, you can create Custom Reports, which allow you to choose the dimensions and metrics, and to add filters. You can also apply ‘segments’, which allow you to view any report with a chosen filter applied. These are useful for a one-off investigation, but the presentation of the data is not very user-friendly.

A better way to do this is to create custom reports in Google Data Studio. This free tool gives you huge scope to present data in a way that focuses on what you want to know. You can draw data from multiple systems, e.g. Google Analytics and Facebook. The other things I like about Google Data Studio reports are that they can be interactive, they can update automatically from the underlying data and they are easily shared.

When it comes to online marketing, many small business owners focus on ‘doing stuff’. They don’t spend any time measuring the results and adjusting the plan.

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio are free tools that can help you with this. It is worth investing in some upfront planning, set-up of the tools, and learning how to interpret the data. Every business is different, so you will need to make sure you are measuring the right things for your particular business. Then you will have a valuable feedback loop to help you make online marketing decisions confidently. Website Insights can help with this – ask me about web analytics services that are the right fit for your particular business.

This article was first published as a guest post for Your Time Matters.