How Google Analytics Can Help Small Businesses

Google Analytics makes it easy for business owners to keep track of the performance of their website. It provides basic website usage statistics such as visitors, page visits and bounce rate (the number of visitors who visited one page then clicked off the website), but also offers many more complex and powerful options.

Setting up Google Analytics

It’s free and easy to create a Google Analytics account – you just need an existing Google account to sign up. Once you’re signed up you’ll be given a small piece of tracking code to put on each page of your website, usually in the footer. If your website is a WordPress site, it just needs to be added once.

Once this piece of code is in place the performance of the website will start being tracked. Within 24 hours you will start to see the information appear in your Analytics account.

The dashboard

The dashboard is the landing page when you log into Analytics. From here you are given a snapshot of visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time spent on the site, new visitors, a graph of traffic trends, maps of geographic traffic sources and a chart of visitors by traffic type (direct, search engines, referring sites, etc).

All of this data can be drilled down into greater detail. For example, the map of global traffic sources can be drilled down to show traffic by region or even city.

The dashboard also shows the number of pre-defined goals that have been met. Say for example you were keen to track the number of visitors that looked at 5 or more pages of your site – you could create this as a goal and the number of the times the goal was achieved would be displayed in the dashboard.

The more complex stuff…

Google Analytics also offers more complex and in-depth statistics. Some of the options available include.

• The browsers and operating system that visitors use -  including mobile browsers and devices. This information could be useful when thinking about your mobile web strategy.
• In-page analytics – An overlay of any page on your site can be shown with graphics showing user activity.
• Custom reports – It’s possible to create custom reports using only the data that you’re interested in.

How Google Analytics can help small businesses

For a business owner the most important information will be the content or pages that visitors are most interested in, what visitors are least interest in and – perhaps most important of all – where visitors have arrived at the site from.

The information on traffic sources shows how many visitors have arrived at the site via a search engine, how many have come from referring websites and how many have manually entered the URL of the website (direct traffic). This data can be particularly useful in determining the success of search engine optimisation (SEO), the performance social media campaigns (on say Facebook or Twitter) or establishing good referring websites to target with advertising.

It’s also possible to automatically export reports from Google Analytics to Excel. If your website is a WordPress site, an Analytics plugin can display performance data in your WordPress dashboard, meaning that you’ll see your data every time you log into your website.

It’s worth getting into the habit of checking your Analytics statistics on a regular basis – at least once per week – in order to see any unexpected trends and to identify content that isn’t working well. Quickly establishing something that is driving users away and changing to something that works could return almost immediate results.