Google Analytics for Small Businesses
Google Analytics is an essential and free addition for any business with a website. It allows business owners and marketing directors to easily determine the two most important things about the visitors to their website: Where the visitors came from and what they did once they were on the site. This tool allows you to measure the number of visitors to a particular site, types of traffic, how they accessed the site, and what words were entered into search engines to get them to your site. This detailed information makes Google Analytics an effective tool for measuring the success of marketing campaigns, how to better enhance your site for different users, and the keywords and links visitors use to find your site.
Basic Features
Google Analytics summarizes basic statistics about visitor traffic on an easy-to-read dashboard. Just login to the Google Analytics account that covers your site and bring up metrics covering
- number of visits to the site
- pageviews
- number of pages viewed per visit
- average time on site and
- the percentage of visits that are new visitors
These summary statistics provide small business-owners with the information they need to see how their site is doing overall.
Above these statistics is a graphical display of visits to your site. This visual representation of visits shows peaks and valleys in site traffic. For example, say you had a spike in visits on one day, as seen on the graph. You could attribute to this spike to some sort of promotion you had going on for your company. By looking at Traffic Sources, Google Analytics makes it possible to measure exactly how much each promotion has increased your site’s traffic.
Additional Features
Additional features include a map overlay feature, which color-codes the countries and states in which your site has been accessed based on number of visits. By knowing the states in which your site is accessed, you can target your market and advertise to them based on this knowledge. You can test off-line campaigns, for example, radio campaigns, by playing the campaigns in specific geographical areas, and then using Google Analytics to see the effectiveness by geographic market.
Another useful pane in this dashboard is the “traffic sources overview” which represents the different ways in which the site is accessed in a pie chart. This graphical representation makes for a clear distinction about how users are accessing the site. If one slice of the pie is significantly smaller than another, it is an indication that more can be done to utilize this source. Examples of traffic sources include the way in which the site was accessed, such as through a search engine or by directly connecting to the site.
Advanced Segments
For a more detailed analysis, Advanced Segments can be used to filter for specific types of visitors to your site. For example, one advanced segment screens for mobile users, specifically:
- how long they were on the site
- where they came from, and
- how many pages they accessed
With the increase in number of mobile users, it is crucial that sites have mobile versions to enhance user experience. For example, banking websites need to have mobile versions of their sites so that customers can access their financial information at any time. On the other hand, a retail site may not have much traffic from mobile phones, indicating little need for a mobile site. Google Analytics conveys accurate information about how visitors are accessing your site, and if the results show that only few people access it from phones, there may be no need for a mobile version.
The default segments listed in the screen shot above are built into Google Analytics. You can also create custom segments to note visitors who meet other criteria specific to your business needs, for example, people who came from another site belonging to your business, or perhaps your trade organization, or from a particular referring site or campaign.
Customization
Out of the box, Google provides a dashboard, reports, and visitor segments answering common business questions about what’s occurring at your site. You can create custom reports, variables, and segments to pinpoint the questions you want answered about your site, promotions and visitors, so you can make better business decisions going forward.
It’s also easy to see how one time period is doing compared to another, this month vs. last month or this spring vs. last spring.
Conclusion
The service that you once had to pay for is now available to the public at no cost, and it is game-changing in terms of understanding marketing channels and matching different sources of site traffic with the revenue they generate. Overall, Google Analytics is an unparalleled service—it is free to use and provides business owners with invaluable information about their website and business.
For a fast but thorough Google Analytics setup for small business, contact the SEO team at Marketing Puget Sound. We’ll show you how to monitor all the important aspects of your online traffic, help you spot any problems, and be available for further support as needed.