woman typing on laptop computerHave a website for your small to midsize business? Want to increase your sales? If you answered “yes” to both of those questions, then it’s time you put the power of Google Analytics to work for you. The world’s most widely used web analytics service, Google Analytics can help you glean powerful insights about every customer who visits your web domain – insights that can help you streamline your site and jumpstart your sales. In today’s blog we show you how to set up your website for tracking by Google Analytics. Then, we cover just a few of the innumerable tools you can use to both better understand the customers who visit your site while simultaneously attracting new ones.

 

Setting Up Your Site for Tracking

The first step to using Google Analytics is setting up your website for tracking. Google refers to this as “setting up a property.” If you haven’t done so already, visit google.com/analytics to sign up for your free account. Then, log in to your account and click on the “Admin” tab. Next, select the account you want to add a property to in the “Account” column. Then click on, “Create new property” in the “Property” column and select “Website.” You can then enter your site’s name and URL. After you’ve entered your website details, it’s time to set up your tracking code. To do so, click “Get tracking ID.” You now have two choices … you can simply add that tracking code into the HTML of every page on your website or use Google Tag Manager to incorporate tags from other sources like AdWords Conversion Tracking. To add your tracking code into your site’s HTML, you (or your webmaster) need to sign into your Google Analytics account, select the “Admin” tab, and select the site you are working on from the “Account” and “Property” columns. Then select, “tracking info” followed by “tracking code.” Your tracking code snippet should now appear in a box along with several lines of JavaScript. You can then copy and paste your code directly into the HTML for every web page you want to track. Just be sure to place it right before the closing </head> tag in the page code.

 

Understanding Your Google Dashboard So you’ve set up your account for tracking. Now what? Getting to know your Google dashboard is a great place to start. Your dashboard will display a variety of graphs, charts and stats showing you things like the number of visitors your page has received over a set time period including the percentage of first-time visitors and repeat visitors. It will also show you the average length of time each visitor stays on a page. You can then use this info to optimize both your online marketing strategies and your website content to encourage more and longer visits.

 

Audience Overview Tool As a business owner, knowing who your customers are is absolutely imperative to your success. Want to determine the age and gender makeup of your website visitors? How about their geographic locations? You can glean all these insights and many more by accessing the “Audience Overview” tool in the left sidebar of your dashboard.

 

Branded Search Traffic Tool Want to see how many people are searching for your company name on a daily basis and what other keywords they entered into their search engines to find you? Go to “Traffic Sources” then click on “Sources.” Next, click on “Search” followed by “Organic.” Finally, enter your business name into the “Advanced” form field and click on the magnifying glass.

 Non-Branded Search Traffic Tool Want to check how your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts are going? Google Analytics also offers a non-branded search engine traffic tool to see how many people found your site without searching for your company name. To access the tool, simply follow the same steps listed above under branded search but then click on “Advanced” to exclude the name of your company/brand.

 

Social Media Network Referrals Tool Want to see which social sites are sending the most visitors to your website? Click on the “Reporting” tab. Select “Acquisition” then “Social” followed by “Network Referrals.” You should now see a list of your various social channels and how much web traffic each is generating for your site.

 Mobile Performance Report The number of mobile search queries has officially passed the number of searches performed on desktop. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile with Google Analytics’ Mobile Performance Report. To access the report, simply select “Audience” then “Mobile” and “Overview.”

As mentioned above, these tools and reports are just the tip of the Google Analytics iceberg. For more in-depth look at what Google Analytics can do for your business, click here.

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