Using Google Analytics to Track Your Audience
By Jamie Hooker
If your company or business is part of the 21st century, it has a website. Today, a business’s website is the very first place a potential customer will go if they want to know more about what you do and the services your company offers. It’s where they generally find the most information. A website is also a place you, as a business owner, can find the most information about your audience. Google Analytics is a great tool to use for research on your business. How many people visit your website every day? How long are they staying there? What are they clicking on the most? All of these questions can be answered using Google Analytics. And the best part? It’s free. There is a premium version you can choose to buy, but the free version still gives you a lot of really good information. Here are a few of the many things Google Analytics (GA) can do for you.
1) GA can show you what content your audience looking at the most and what they are looking at the least. This is good to know so you can see what people like or don’t like about your website and you can make changes accordingly. If your FAQ page to your website gets a lot of hits, maybe consider adding more questions and answers to that list. If the blog on your website isn’t getting a lot of hits, this might mean you need to change up your content. Either way, this information can be very beneficial.
2) GA can show you how many people are viewing your website from their cell phones. This might show you need a more mobile-friendly website (if you don’t have one already). People are always connected to their cell phones, whether they’re at home or not. You have probably experienced a time when you searched for a website on your phone and you had to annoyingly scroll and zoom in a million times to find what you’re looking for. Creating a mobile site is just the next logical step after establishing a website.
3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important. You want your website to come up high in a Google search when the audience types in key words that have to do with your business. GA builds SEO reports to show you how users got to your site and where you can strengthen your SEO. These reports show the number of impressions your website’s URLs got in search results pages, the average position of your website’s URLs in search listings, what queries users typed to reach your site, and a few more things that you can find here.
We have just scratched the surface here of what Google Analytics can do for your website. Navigating GA at first can be a challenge, but once you get a handle on it and figure out exactly what you’re looking at, you’ll be surprised how much you can learn about your business.