Why every business needs Google Analytics

So you’ve got a great website that’s promoting your business – how do you know whether anyone is visiting it? It’s time to install Google Analytics, to see how your website is performing.

What is Google Analytics?
Every business with a website needs Google Analytics to assess the performance of the site and see whether it’s doing its job properly. Google Analytics will show you how many people have visited your site, which country they are from, how they found your site and which pages on your site get the most views. You can find out how many of your visitors bought something and discover which of your marketing strategies are proving most successful. The system will even tell you which blog posts your visitors like the best.

How do I get Google Analytics?
You’ll need a Google account to get started, so if you haven’t got one already, you need to set one up, which is a quick and easy process. Make sure you do this yourself, as if anyone else uses their Google account to set it up for you, then they will forever receive your statistics! Now you head to Google Analytics, fill in some details about yourself and your site and you’ll be issued with a tracking code. You need to copy and paste this code onto every page of your website, so that the system can identify your site.

Set up goals
Click on the Admin link at the top of the Google Analytics page, find the View column and then click on Goals. Here you can set up as many as twenty different goals, such as a visitor filling out a contact form, making a purchase or signing up to a newsletter.

Discover what visitors search for
Within Google Analytics, there are reports showing what search terms are driving visitors to your site, and also what search terms they use when searching within your site. Based on this information, you can alter your marketing strategy accordingly.

Using Google Analytics
Whenever you log into your Google Analytics account, you will be directed to the Audience Overview for your site. Here you can see a snapshot of how many visitors your site has had, where they came from, what they looked at and how long they stayed. You can compare visitors on different dates and see how many of your visitors converted to sales. You can even discover what screen sizes visitors were using, which operating system and which browser.
Once you can measure the activity of your visitors, then you can more effectively manage your marketing strategy – this is why every business needs Google Analytics.