Use Google Analytics to Get Actionable Intel for Your Small Business
Many of us understand that using Google Analytics to learn how our marketing efforts are doing can be a key to unleashing future success. However many people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the data facing them. You need to begin with answering the right questions: what are my goals, and what do I need to know to achieve them. Google Analytics can indeed be a perplexing mountain of data to decipher, and with no game plan you can get lost very easily. Let's look at some ways to learn which metrics to follow, and ways to use Analytics for your best advantage.
Understanding which metrics you need
While each business will present somewhat different needs, the more useful common needs follow.
- Total visits – Knowing how many visitors you are getting is a basic measurement of success, assuming they are targeted visitors. Examine both “unique” (first time) visitors, and total visits, which include returnees.
- Keyword phrases – Understanding which keyword phrases are driving traffic to your page is vital. This data can help you know how to target your primary and secondary keywords.
- Popular pages – Which of your pages are receiving the most notice, and which aren't!
- Visitors geo-location – Which countries are generating the most traffic for you?
- Referring pages – Which pages are sending you the most traffic? This could be from any number of sources, including affiliates, video, images, social media and more.
- Search engine traffic – Which search engines are delivering the most visitors.
Google Analytics advanced features to help decipher the data
Three handy advanced features are extremely useful when dealing with processing and understanding this information.
Custom reports will provide you with the cabability to create a version of Google Analytics just for you. You can select the data that's important to you, and organize it any way you like.
Advanced segmenting will let you sort traffic into segments that highlight the data, such as segmenting out mobile or tablet traffic.
Intelligence events is akin to Google Alerts, and sends a you an email or text to your mobile device when anything out of the ordinary happens on your site, such as a spike in traffic, either up or down.
