It’s been an interesting week for me. Several times, over the course of a few days, different colleagues have stated that Google Analytics cannot really tell them anything about their social media strategy. One colleague reported that Google Analytics was useless as it could not tell him where his traffic was coming from and the other colleague disclosed that although he didn’t find Google Analytics useful, he really hadn’t explored it properly. I knew that hearing complaints twice in one day about Google Analytics warranted a blog post.
First of all, I want to state for the record that I do believe that Google Analytics is a viable and important option for monitoring your business’ social media strategy and traffic flow. In fact, I think that it’s an especially effective tool for most small businesses that lack the manpower and resources for some more complex and expensive analysis tools. By simply placing a few lines of code on your website, you can actually get valuable insights into the way people use your website, where they are coming from, how long they stay, where they look and the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Why Tracking Analytics Is Important
- Understanding how customers interact with your website
- See where customers enter and exit your website
- See which products are your best and worst
- Understand what content people are most interested in
- Gather information about your customers (geographical location, time on site, search engine trends, etc)
- Determine which parts of your website your customers are seeing and which parts they are not
- See which keywords are bringing people to your site
- Analyze how effective different campaigns are
- Know where your web traffic is coming from
- Monitor traffic from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
- See mobile use of your website and analyze that segments behavior
What You Can Measure With Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can get a variety of data that can be exported into different reports. In the left-hand column of the Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll see various types of data:
- Visitors: Who is coming to your site, where they are geographically, what language, how often they visit, how long they stay and what browsers they are using
- Referrals: This tell you about the visitors to your website who arrived by way of someone else’s website and not a search engine.
- Traffic Sources: This provides data on how people got to your site, using which keywords were used and which sites link to your site.
- Content: This tab will give you insight on which pages are most popular on your site and which pages people enter and exit your site from.
- Goals: If you set up a specific social media campaign, you can create goals or objectives through this tab to determine whether they are performing your desired actions, including registrations, purchases and downloads.
There are many different analytics packages out there, both free and paid. However, for the small business owner, by learning the ins and outs of Google Analytics, you will be in great shape when you’re ready to start using the more complex programs. Until then, Google analytics will provide you with some very important data about how your website is being searched, viewed and navigated through. You can set up goals, events and campaigns and track them. So to all those who say that Google analytics are not useful, I say that perhaps they need a refresher course on how to use it to its full extent.
That’s just my opinion. What do you think of Google Analytics in comparison to the other analytic programs out there?
Related articles
- 4 Google Analytics Features Small Businesses Should Be Using Right Now (swipelyworks.com)
- Social Media Metrics for the Small Business Owner (adrsocialmedia.com)
- 10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using (mashable.com)
- How to track return customers using Google Analytics (christopherspenn.com)
- How to Build an Effective Google+ Brand Strategy (mashable.com)
- Over-Analyzing Your Social Media Game Plan: Part 2 of 2 – Obsessing About How Well You’re Doing It (insatiablesolopreneur.com)
First of all, thanks for linking to the SwipelyWorks blog post about GA
Second, to answer your question, I love GA in comparison to other analytics platforms I’ve dealt with. Mostly because I can do everything myself instead of asking some system administrator to track things. I think it’s also visually appealing enough for the data to somehow make more sense. I’m also partial to it because of how well it fits with everything else I use, like wordpress and some of the plugins that go with it. Little effort, tons of data. Since it’s 3rd party, I’ve seen different results from GA compared to a built-in system, but not a big enough difference to pay a ton for every other site I build.
In any case, there’s my two cents.
Amanda
Thanks for reading and commenting, Amanda. I totally agree with you. I think that while some companies complicate a process that really needs to be simplified, Google Analytics provides a great deal of useful information and is well worth the cost (free).