What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google that tracks and reports key website data such as:
- Real-Time website traffic: How many visitors are currently on your website.
- Past website traffic by acquisition source: All of your website traffic broken down by source. For example, you can see how many visitors came to your website from Google or Bing search engines, Facebook or Twitter social media sites, and/or even those who came from offline advertising sources!
- Audience: Information about the visitors who visit your website, such as demographics, general interest, geography/location, new vs. returning visitors, the device the visitor used to access your site (ex: Windows PC or iPhone), and other additional visitor data.
- Behavior: How a visitor behaves on your website. A few examples are; what page(s) are viewed most often, how long the average visitor stays on your website, how visitors flow through your website, and/or what page most visitors leave your site from.
- Conversions: Similar to behavior, but defined by customized goals and events such as a website form submission, online purchase, calls from website, newsletter sign up, social media follow, or anything you would consider a successful website visit.
Why Google Analytics Data is Important?
The data Google Analytics provides is absolutely critical in running a successful marketing campaign.. Without it, you will be in-the-dark about how your website is performing and/or if your online (and potentially offline) marketing is driving a return-on-your-investment.
At St. Louis Digital Media, we use Google Analytics daily to evaluate such things as:
- Traffic decreases and increases: Identifying the date(s) of the decrease / increase to determine the cause and if there is a correlation between the two. For example, let’s say your business typically ranked well for target keywords on search engines, but all of the sudden you stopped and you’re not sure when or why. We will figure out when, why we believe your rankings fell, and a solution to potentially restore your previous rankings.
- Sales decreases and increases: Similar to above, but using sales instead of traffic. For example, if traffic is up and sales are down, we will look at visitor behavior to see if there is poor website user experience signals.
- Online Advertising ROI: Simply, are you earning more than you are spending? For example, you are spending 1k a month on Facebook ads designed to drive traffic to your website to either sell your products online or have users fill out a free estimate form, but did you receive enough sales and revenue to cover and/or exceed your costs.
- Who Converts: Identifying who is converting and how to improve conversions. Are new or returning visitors converting into sales or leads, what are the traffic sources most converters are coming from, etc.
Why You Need Help With Google Analytics?
While all the items above can help you achieve your internet marketing goals, properly setting up Google Analytics requires a fairly high amount of technical knowledge. Plus, all of the data provided is worthless if you are unaware of the vocabulary and do not know how to find or pull the reports you are seeking. This is where we come in.
We invite you to assess your Google Analytics knowledge below. If you cannot fully answer any of the following, your business or organization will benefit from our Google Analytics services.
Google Analytics Test
Test your skills… how many of the following can you answer?
- What city drives the most visits to your website?
- What is your bounce rate from google / organic for the past 30 days?
- From #2, is your bounce rate above or below average?
- What is a Goal? And are they setup in your Analytics?
- What is the difference between a Goal and an Event?
- Which page do most visitors exit your website from?
- How many people have visited your website using an iPhone?
- What is your time lag in days prior to conversion?
- Which page on your website takes the longest load?
- How do you remove internal traffic from your analytics reports?
- *Can you create a custom report comparing conversions “A” vs “B” from Google Adwords for a custom date range, then compare that to the previous period?
Confused? If so give us a call for a free consultation. If not, call us for a job.
