It may seem much easier to ignore the swamp of ‘complicated’ tech products and continue with your tried-and-true old school ways. If it aint broke, why fix it, right? Afterall, you’ve probably broken personal boundaries already by investing in putting your business online during Covid restrictions, isn’t that enough? But wait, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water! More than ever before, in our forever changed Covid world, you and your business must evolve too, if you’re going to survive. 

Having a business website and social media accounts, are definitely good moves in the right direction but you need more than these to ensure customer traffic and ramp up your business revenue growth. What’s the point of an online store if nobody goes to it? As well, don’t assume your customers have the same needs as they did in the past. They too have marched on, so how will you meet their needs if you no longer know what they’re doing or what they want? And it’s not just about keeping your customers of old, you need a way to expand your customer base for growth too. That’s where Google Analytics can be your best mate and ally supporting your business’ viability, growth, and sustainability. This is one technology product you can’t afford to ignore.

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What is Google Analytics?

It’s a free tool that Google offers to help you analyze the traffic visiting your website. It would be naïve to discount, as unnecessary, such a powerful tool that’ll transform how you do business. Over 50 million websites attest to this, as current users of Google Analytics (GA). If free doesn’t clinch it for you, then how about super easy to set up and start using?

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What do I need to do to set up GA?

You can set up a Google Analytics account by pasting several lines of tracking code into your website so you can track the activities of website visitors along with demographic information about them, such as, geographical location, age, gender, interests etc. All this is exported to a GA database on which you can view information on 4 different levels i) user level (actions by individuals) ii) session level (every individual visit to your site) iii) pageview (which pages were visited) iv) event level (buttons clicked, videos viewed etc.).

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How will my company benefit from using this?

1) You’ll know where your website visitors have come from. Understanding your referral traffic is key to targeting a relevant customer base and creating an effective marketing strategy. It takes the guess work out of marketing, e.g., if you know your traffic is mobile derived, then you know you’ll need to invest in an optimized mobile app to rein in more of these customers.

Learn how to set up your GA for referral traffic here.

2) Knowing where your customers are geographically, will help you address their needs and let you know if there’s a potential for growing your customer base in this area.

Track customers geographically by setting up sales based geographical segments on GA.

3) You’ll be able to add extra value to your marketing strategies by creating specific campaigns to appeal to your niche customer segments. For segment-builder user interface, check out this.

4) You can create and track campaigns. Companies are constantly looking to increase their customer base, isn’t that so? To draw attention to your business you need to create campaigns that resonate with your customers. But how can you tell whether your campaigns have hit the mark? You’re in luck with GA which allows you to measure the impact your campaigns are having on customers. To find out how, look up this.

5) You can learn what search terms draw in traffic. Knowing this, you can make sure to embed these in your website’s content for loads of visitor hits. GA acquisitions sections allow you to see a breakdown of each search query that’s directing traffic to your site. You can adapt your keyword use for SEO through this.

6) You’ll be able to study your competition to see how many visitors they’re getting and how your site is comparing with customer engagement. Google has made this very easy for you to achieve with Chrome User Experience Connector. Go to ‘How to build a Google Data Studio Dashboard’ and use one of the step by step instruction links.

7) You will learn the type of content that works best for your marketing. You can’t attract and hook customers if your website lacks interesting, valuable content. Use GA to see what content has high views and shares. Then streamline your content accordingly.GA breaks down pageviews of each of your posts so you can weed out, update, and adapt these to optimize views and shares. Check out this.

8) You’ll be able to find out why visitors are bouncing off your site. It’d be vexing as an online store owner to see your site has high views but few conversions. GA allows you to drill deep to find out why e.g., maybe your site isn’t optimized properly and is attracting irrelevant traffic, or your landing page is unappealing, or navigation of your site is confusing or cluttered etc. Use the link above in 7) to discover your bounce rate.

9) You’ll be able to find out which social media platforms to target to reach the most relevant customers for your business. You can see how much conversion value social media is generating and how many users are talking about your company/ products on GA. Learn how to set up social analytics on GA here.

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Take outs:

For new online store operators, implementing the above features will give your business a leg up and push it in the right direction. To manage your GA account more easily, get: the GoogleAnalytics app for eCommerce. 

To up your data analytics game with very powerful business decision-making support, use this combo of 3 FREE Google tools: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager (so you’re not stuck with only analyzing your own website data which is a limitation of GA) and Google Data Studio.