Google Analytics is a powerful platform that helps website owners analyze their web traffic and gives recommendations on how to improve their website. Small businesses can benefit from these types of analytics tools to not only increase traffic, but also increase sales.
Know What Questions You’re Trying to Answer
Google Analytics provides a myriad of information to webmasters, but unless you know what you’re looking for, the available data can get overwhelming. As a small business, it’s best to open Google Analytics with an idea of what kind of information you’re looking to glean from the data. Common questions many small businesses ask include:
• Which websites are providing the most referral traffic?
• Are people finding our website through related or unrelated keyword searches?
• Which keywords are driving the most traffic to our blog?
By answering direct questions, you can continually hone your SEO and growth goals by targeting problem areas.
Start Using Custom Reports
To work through the clutter of Analytics, Google offers custom monthly reports that organize data into spreadsheets. These spreadsheets can include everything from referral URLs to relevant keywords and search traffic volume. Instead of logging into Analytics monthly to try and piece all of the information together yourself, you can automatically create a custom report that will email itself to you to save your business time. These detailed reports can also make recommendations about future monthly actions to help increase traffic.
Data Within Data
One of the most underused Google Analytics services is advanced segmentation. Advanced segmenting lets users not only see what type of traffic is coming to their site, it also lets you find out additional information about the functionality of that traffic.
A common example is segmenting mobile data to see not only which pages are being visited by mobile visitors, but also what sorts of retention rates each page has. By knowing which pages are most commonly visited by mobile users, businesses can develop custom mobile versions of their site specifically tailored to a smaller screen by offering only the most popular pages mobile users are visiting.
Better Content
The most popular use for Google Analytics is to help businesses develop stronger content. By combining your Analytics account with your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can see which keywords are generating the most traffic for your site, which pieces of content are your strongest performers, and which content needs some work. By combining these metrics, you can not only modify existing content to be more keyword friendly to Google searches, you can also develop new content to attract new traffic.
For sites with multiple subdirectories, like news sites with multiple news categories, Google’s “Content Drilldown” section of Analytics shows which sections of the site are most popular and why they’re outperforming other parts of the website.
Don’t Be Afraid
While Google Analytics is extremely comprehensive, it doesn’t have to be intimidating. Starting small and slowly adding additional pieces of information to your monthly reports and strategies is the best way for small businesses to dive in and get ahead of the competition.