Google analytics is a tool that delivers detailed reports on your website or blog. Many people are aware of this tool but don’t understand how detailed these analytic reports can be and how they can then be used to help develop your site. To set up an analytics account all you need is an active email address. Once the account is created you will be able to add the URL of the site you want analytics for. Google then gives you a tiny bit of code that needs to be inputted on to every page of your site, this is normally done by inserting the code into the footer but most blog platforms will have a separate analytics area for you to paste the code into. Once the account is set up you will be able to view your websites analytical reports. Below are my top five reasons on why you need Google analytics and how it can be used to further develop your site.

Traffic
How can you tell if your site is doing well if you can’t see how many people are visiting it? When people ask us to look at their site for improvements the first question we ask is how much traffic is it getting? I am always surprised when people reply with ‘I don’t know’.  Not knowing how many visitors you get is like organising a BBQ when you don’t know how many guests are coming. How do you prepare for it to make sure guests are satisfied and how much time do you put towards it without knowing if your efforts will be re-rewarded? In the world of print advertising if you could find out how many people exactly will see your advert and then on top of that how many people took action on your print ad wouldn’t you snap that up straight away? Well this is what Google analytics does. Google analytics tells you exactly how many times your website has been viewed and how many of those viewings were unique. Google analytics produces a monthly line graph so you can see your traffic slowly increase and track the popularity of your site or blog.

Traffic Sources
Knowing how much traffic you are getting is great but it’s also very beneficial to know where that traffic is coming from.  Google can break down into a easy to view pie chart where which percentage of your traffic is coming from, for example 75% are coming from Google while 10% are coming from Facebook. Knowing where your visitors are coming from means that you can then focus on improving on different areas. Maybe Twitter is providing more website views than Facebook or Google more than Yahoo.

Keywords
In the search engines it is extremely important to know what keywords you are being found for. Google analytics tells you exactly what keywords a visitor typed in to Google to then find your site and how many have done this for each keyword. This is vital for improving the SEO of your site. By realising what keywords you are being found for means you can then look to improve your websites position for these phrases by working on their SEO. For more information regarding SEO please click here.

Goals / Conversion
Google analytics helps you set up ‘Goals’. These ‘Goals’ can be anything from lead generation, gathering email addresses or even downloading application forms. By setting these up, Google is able to tell you exactly how many people have done what you want them to do. This is a great aspect of the analytical tool as it shows you what tangible results your website or blog is providing you with.  This will be able to help you decide whether to dedicate more time and recourses into a site or not.

Popular pages
If you have a large site or even a site with lots of different subject areas, than this can be a great tool to be able to use. Not only does Google analytics tell you how many overall visitors your site gets, it shows you exactly which pages they visited within the site. This can help you see how many people read about a particular product or even how many people viewed your ‘contact us’ page to get in contact with you. This can be great in seeing which areas are the most popular and how you can get other areas up to the same standard.

This has been a beginners whistle stop tour to Google analytics. There are still so many more areas that I haven’t even touched on in the article. If you have any questions regarding how to use Google analytics or even how to set an account up then please feel free to get in contact with us.

So now we’re all being told we’re in a deep recession, come on people…..it’s now time to start understanding how to make your budget work harder! 

Gone are the days when you threw as much as you could at the wall hoping for something to stick or you position your meta data and keywords in their rightful places and hope for the best, let’s start thinking a little bit beyond the stale old marketing techniques and start embracing the new online world. The quicker you do it and understand it the quicker you’ll get to where you need to be. Some might say you’ve already missed the boat? Personally I completely disagree, I speak to many companies daily and 70% of these companies are still nowhere near where they need to be in terms of technology, skills and knowledge so you still have time. 

We’ve reported in past blogs that online marketing is set to increase dramatically over during 2009 and the reason is ‘The Stats Don’t Lie!’ 

Let’s look at things in a simplistic manner, would you go out and buy a new Mini without test driving it first? Read a review or two? Listen to a mate who raves about how good his Mini is? No of course not, because you want to know that you’re not wasting your money and let’s be honest there’s obviously a few spare Minis out there at the moment so you’re bound to pick up a bargain. 

Thinking about the above scenario within the marketing spectrum any sensible business owner, marketing manager/director will want to be able test, track, analyse and basically understand the metrics. This will enable them to see if the activities they’re looking to invest into are going to provide them with the desired return which inevitably is sales, or switching back to the above scenario an enjoyable and reliable drive that’s not going to be a waste of your hard earned cash. 

I used to sell advertising and while I still love magazines and buy into the whole print media industry from a marketer’s perspective it’s a gamble. You can place numerous promotional codes on the advertisement however you can never really understand the full mechanics and your exact returns.  When I used to sell advertising I always dreaded the renewal process. Having to present to an advertiser, who the year before spent £30k with me on a repeat half page colour ad on page 7, why they should sign up for another year without any hard core facts and figures, barring the fact that our circulation had increased by 3000 was always a challenge. 

Spending money on marketing always represents a gamble however marketing online represents far less of a gamble as you can test and measure. I love that ability, test and measure! It makes everything a lot clearer and my decisions a lot easier. 

Online Marketing needs to be embraced and if you haven’t yet fear not, there is still the window of opportunity.  I spoke to a company the other day who basically was bragging that they had x amount of traffic to their site and x amount of back links which was true, however where this company failed in the online spectrum was the analytics and measuring part of equation. As, when we looked into the traffic 80% of it came from America and Google.com not Google.co.uk and the fact that they only sold to the UK was quite concerning and in relation to their links 60% came from one source which isn’t bad but isn’t really helping their SEO cause. 

Whatever online activity you feel is going to help your business, take a step and trial it as the Stats Don’t Lie! Good luck and if you need any advice call 01635 550 431 and speak to the Generate UK Team.

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One of the major contributors to the growth of online marketing is the fact that it is very measurable. It is quickly possible to check your results, tweak, rinse and repeat. We’re used to analysing the data that is available to us, it’s a good habit to be in and it is great to be able to measure the total cost of ownership.

Unfortunately, this thirst for figures and information does not always transfer to the web site. We’re constantly amazed at how few businesses check their web logs, traffic status and information. Your web site log is a real time snapshot of the browsing habits of your prospects and customers. You can find out who they are, what they do and do not look at, how long they look at things and where they enter and leave your site. All of this information should be treated like gold dust. If you find out that a high percentage of your visitors leave on a certain page, that’s a pretty strong message that you need to work on the stickiness of that page.

If you’re used to applying key performance metrics to your marketing activity, it is easy to extend this to your web site. Access to the core data will explain where you are today in terms of targeted traffic, users, search terms etc and will enable you to set goals and success factors for the future. If you’re in the fortunate position of receiving all of your traffic via natural search engines, then you might want to consider alternative sources to drive additional traffic, such as pay per click or an email campaign.

If you have not got an email list, you might want to use your web site to capture your visitors details. This is a great objective for a web site and is a perfectly sensible way to increase your sales and opportunities. If the majority of your traffic is delivered via pay per click, then it is a very good time to look into ways that will increase your free natural search engine traffic.

The point is, even the very best web sites can be improved, there is always a little gem of information available to you that you can use to increase the effectiveness of your site. We would all love to double or treble our traffic, yet we know immediately that this is only beneficial to us if that traffic is targeted, if it stands a chance of being converted. Web site analytics provides us with that insight, it helps us to understand what types of phrases these people use to find us, it helps us to understand what pages they buy from or contact us. It provides us with the raw data to enable us to act, to do something that will improve the performance of our web site.

Our favourite story involving web analytics is about one of our customers who asked us to help them with their Internet Marketing Strategy; in particular increasing the effectiveness of their web site as they felt that they were not getting much value from it. Interestingly, this customer had never looked at their web logs or statistics, it never occurred to them that there was a wealth of information to look at.

We had a look at the logs and they were receiving a decent amount of traffic from a forum. Our customer is in the garden centre business and the forum was about gardening. The referring site in this case was a post from a user in answer to another user’s question about where one might find a certain type of rock for their landscaping.

This one link and referral from another user contributed to a good chunk of business, however it was done without the knowledge of our client. The reason that this link was so powerful was that it encouraged very targeted users to click through to their site and ultimately buy the rocks. Once the customer realised this, it was not long before we were sponsoring the forum, holding regular forum competitions, posting authority pieces, giving away vouchers and driving highly targeted traffic to their web site via the forum. Then it is a case of tweak, rinse and repeat, a perfect example of how using web site analytics can increase the effectiveness of your web site.

If you would like us to have a look at your web site or marketing plans, please contact one of our consultants today. You never know, we might unearth that hidden rock for you too.