Google Analytics is a website statistics package that provides valuable data on the performance of your website. It is one of many website statistics packages available. In order to understand if you are getting the best ROI for your website investments, here are the top 5 benefits of Google Analytics.
- Volume of Reports
Google Analytics offers hundreds of data points and reports that you can monitor. Here are just a few of the reports people typically monitor within Google Analytics:- Traffic: This shows you how many people have visited a website during a time period.
- Referrals: How did a user find your website? This reveals whether they know your URL beforehand or if they clicked on a link from another website.
- Keywords: When a user finds your website from a search engine (such as Google or Bing) you will probably want to know what they typed in. This report shows what keywords or phrases they typed in to get your website to come up.
- Content: Once a user has found your website this report will show you what they actually looked at, such as which pages they viewed and much more
- Areas of Improvement on Your Site
One of the biggest reasons to monitor your website statistics is to understand what areas need improvement. If there is a content page that hardly ever gets viewed it could be a sign that content updates or changes need to be made. Or, if all of your keywords include your organization name, this means that the people finding you already know who you are. So you might need to revisit your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy to ensure you are being found for the products or services you offer.
- Central Place for Accounts
Google Analytics allows you to link all of your Google accounts together to ensure they are all working in conjunction with one another. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools or an AdWords account you can link all of these together with a couple easy clicks. After linking your accounts you will get a better view of the overall performance of your website.
- Goal tracking
Within Analytics you have the ability to create custom goals. This allows you to quickly track the performance of a campaign you have configured or what you value most for your website. A goal can be any of the following:- Visit of a specific page
- Staying on the website for a specific duration of time
- Visiting a number of pages during a visit
- Events, which can be playing a video, clicking a link, downloading a file, etc.
- Custom reports
If one of the many reports available in Google Analytics does not meet your needs, you can easily create custom reports of the data you would like to see. This also makes it easy to create a report for your management team or owners to keep them updated on the performance of your website.
If you need help understand your website analytics, contact Informatics.
