4 Reasons To Install Google Analytics On Your Website
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to analyse traffic to your website in detail. It’s very easy to install and simply requires adding a small amount of code to each page on your website. Business owners can often implement this themselves via their CMS (content management system) or via their website developer. In this article, I’ll share my key reasons to install Google Analytics on your website:
1. It allows you to understand how people are finding your website
This is by far my favourite feature within the Google Analytics package. As a digital marketer, gaining an insight into the channels that are driving traffic to my websites is a vital part of my job. By default, you can break down your website traffic into sources such as search engines, referrals (traffic from other websites), direct and social media. This data can then be used to make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy going forward. For example, you could find that you’re investing most of your time posting links on social media but traffic from search engines is actually much larger. In this situation, you may wish to spend more time developing a robust plan to develop your search engine rankings even further. Without this data, it’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of any of your marketing campaigns.
2. It shows you which pieces of content are most popular on your website
Once you’ve got a firm understanding of how users are finding your website, the next natural step is to look at which pieces of content are attracting these people. Google Analytics is incredibly helpful for discovering this data. It will allow you to measure a range of engagement metrics such as; which pages are most popular on your website, how long people spend on these pages, and the traffic sources for each page individually. This data is invaluable for making informed decisions about the types of content that are currently working well for you. This can then be recreated going forward. It will also help to spot opportunities for optimising existing content. For example, you could discover that an old blog post is attracting a lot of traffic from search engines. If this content has become dated, you can then make the decision to refresh the blog post to ensure visitors to your website are getting the most up to date information. These kinds of opportunities would be difficult to spot without a website analytics platform.
3. You can monitor conversions
When configured correctly Google Analytics allows you to track sales within your website. This is vitally important for optimising your website for more sales and to spot your most effective advertising channels. The platform can show you how many sales have been generated from each traffic source, conversion rates, and total revenue. Google Analytics also links with Google Ads to allow you to track conversions from adverts that you may have running in Google’s search results.
4. It’s free
As mentioned at the beginning of the blog, the platform is completely free to use. Given the amount of data that can be utilised to improve the performance of your website, there are very few reasons not to install Google Analytics on your website.
How can I help?
I’ve personally been using Google Analytics across a number of websites for many years. As a result, I’m perfectly placed to offer advice to business owners who want to understand more about the platform. This generally comes in the form of a one to one training/consultancy session. If this is something that would be of interest to you, please do get in touch.