Unless you only plan to use your website for personal things like sharing pictures, videos, and updates with family and a handful of close friends, you’ll want to ensure that your online real estate isn't like an island unto itself on the World Wide Web. In other words, you'll want to ensure that it’s working for you by attracting traffic, generating leads that can boost sales, and building your corporate brand. But how exactly can you gauge your site’s performance?
The way you get the nitty-gritty on your website's performance is by assessing how it’s doing using different criteria, and you can achieve this by looking at things from the analytics level. Google Analytics, as it turns out, is just the sort of tool you need to make use of if you want to optimize the performance of your website so that you sell more products and services even as you glean important data on customers and would-be customers who visit your website. It will also help you to maximize your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and to make better use of your marketing dollars.
Read on for a closer look at Google Analytics. You’ll find that it can help your online strategy.
Google Analytics: What is it and How Does it Work?
Google Analytics is a Web analytics service, available free of charge to anyone who has a Google account, and it provides statistics and analytical tools that can be used for SEO. Google Analytics includes the following features:
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Data visualization solutions such as scorecards, a dashboard, and motion charts that show data changes over time;
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Customized reports;
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Segmentation to facilitate the analysis of subsets like conversions;
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Integration with different Google products like Website Optimizer, AdWords, and Public Data Explorer; and
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Communication and sharing via email.
Part of the power of Google Analytics is that it answers three fundamental questions that you need to ensure that you’re maximizing your company’s website, whether the site was made using Drupal or courtesy of any other method. These questions are as follows:
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Who is visiting your website?
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How did they arrive on your website?
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What did the people do on your website -- and what did they opt not to do while there?
It uses JavaScript code to gather and process information that you can then see through Google Analytics. The tracking code will gather data on how website visitors interact with the various pages on your website. It will let you know how many people accessed different Web pages, how much time they spent on the pages, which specific pages they accessed, and more. The code will also gather information on the sort of devices used to access your website, the type of Internet browsers used, and the traffic source in terms of what people clicked on to get to your website.
Is it Right for Your Website?
If your website would fall into the small-to-medium-sized range as far as websites are concerned, then Google Analytics is a tool you should consider. But despite the powerful analytical tools it offers, it is not adequate to handle the needs of larger enterprises that have websites that are very complex. It's also important to consider the potential security concerns. For instance, users can, courtesy of the Google Analytics Dashboard, obtain data on people who connect their websites to social networking websites like Facebook.
How to Start Using Google Analytics
According to the Google Analytics website, there are three simple steps you need to take to begin analysing your website's traffic:
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Sign Up to Use Google Analytics: You'll merely need to enter some basic information about the website you want to monitor.
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Add the Tracking Code: You'll be given a tracking code to paste onto your website pages so that Google can determine when someone has visited your website.
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Learn About Your Audience: Within several hours, you'll start to see data pertaining to your website.
Google Analytics: Why Should You Use it for Your Website?
If you're selling products or services from your website, you need to be able to measure and analyse the performance of your website, and this is something Google Analytics can help you with. Using the information generated, you'll have the data you need to intelligently pursue an effective marketing strategy. You’ll be able to boost sales and make the most of your marketing efforts by concentrating on the most promising marketing channels. You can best leverage it for your website by taking advantage of the feature set it offers. Consider the following, for example:
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Know Where Customers Are Arriving From: It's important to be able to determine where your customers are coming from. This will give you insight into the people visiting your website, their behaviour, and what they like or don't like about your website.
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Real-Time Tracking of Visitors: You can see in real time how many users are on your website, what Web pages they are visiting, and other things.
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Customizable Reports: You can get customized reports from Google Analytics, and there's even the option to create your own reports.
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Integration with Other Google Products: Another great thing about Google Analytics is that you can integrate it with other Google products that include, but are not limited to, Google Adwords.
Taking advantage of the various features of Google Analytics will give you all the information you need to ascertain the performance of your website. You’ll then be able to make informed decisions on what’s working well, what needs to be tweaked, or what needs to be overhauled. Essentially, Google Analytics should be considered a must-use if you want to ensure that your website performance is at a level that will help your company to achieve its goals.
If you don’t have a website but are thinking about getting one up and running as soon as possible, you can facilitate the website building process using Drupal. This content management software is used to create a lot of the websites you access every day -- perhaps without even being aware of it. Otherwise, there are other ways to create a retail website. But once you have a website up and running, use Google Analytics to gauge its performance.