The Value of Analytics

The Value of Analytics

 

Increase Sales

  Analytics are extremely important for the growth and success of your business. Having information regarding user trends and visitor paths will help you come up with a plan to determine what it is you need to do in order to keep the interest of your users. For example, if the data shows that users are only spending a couple of seconds on a certain page of your website before navigating away, your site must not be providing the information that the users were looking for. Being aware of this information will help you determine which pages of your website need tweaking in order to improve the user experience. This process is imperative if you want to increase your sales. Having content that compels users to navigate through various pages of your website, is as important as the amount of traffic your site is receiving. Google Analytics is one of the only tools that provides you with information needed to increase your conversion rate. Every business should install Google Analytics. It is free to download, and is one of the fastest ways to increase your sales. Even if you do not have the expertise to work with the information Google Analytics provides, it will come in handy in the future when you hire a professional to help you with your digital marketing. Having your website’s analytics history will help the expert get a better understanding of the way that users are navigating through your website. If you do not install Google analytics until you hire a professional, then they will have to start from scratch, and it will take longer to see results. Here are some of the benefits that analytics provide for a business:  

Conversion and Sales Knowledge with Analytics Goals

  How do Visitor Paths help support conversions? With conversion funnels. Your website should support your business goals, which are defined on your site as conversions. However, lots of things can count as conversions: someone buying a product, someone clicking to call your office, filling out a form, even watching a video all the way through or downloading a white paper. Completing any of these actions can be tracked using goals. Analytics has four types of goals that you can use: Destination (like a “Thank You for Purchasing!” page that someone lands on after buying something), Duration (if someone has spent more than a certain amount of time on your site), Pages per session (someone views more than a certain number of pages) and Event (someone shares your post on social media, plays a video, or clicks an ad). Not only can Goal Tracking help you to understand which pages your audience engages with, but they also help you to understand your site’s conversion funnel. When shopping for a car, most people don’t just grab their checkbook and walk to the nearest dealer to make a purchase. They do some research first. Your site’s conversions are the same. Maybe someone finds your blog post through a Google search. After they’re done reading it, what should their next step be? Maybe it’s to read another, related post. If they’ve read through several posts, they’re beginning to associate your site with expertise. Then, maybe they come back to your site to look at something more salesy, like your Client List or, for an ecommerce site, they look at a category page. Then, eventually, if they’re still interested, they’ll click to purchase or contact you. This process of beginning with broad research and moving into a narrower search can be visualized as a funnel, leading visitors to a conversion. The funnel helps you understand the conversion process, but also helps when building out new pages or new sections of the site. When creating new content, you always want to ask: which of my business goals does this support? (Brand awareness, lead generation, etc.) Which stage of the funnel does this fit into? And how can I encourage visitors to move to the next stage of the funnel?  

Trends

  Google analytics keeps track of user trends on your website. For example, multiple users may be navigating to your website through a specific blog post. Or maybe people are navigating to your homepage through a Google search but are immediately navigating away from your site within 5 seconds of being there. These trends are important to look out for so that you can begin to plan how you are going to convert the users into customers.  

Visitor Paths

  One of the best attributes of Google Analytics is being able to track your visitor’s path while navigating through your website. Google Analytics provides detailed information about the visitors on your site, such as gender, location, which type of browser they use, and if they are on a desktop computer or navigating through your mobile site. This will help you determine your demographic. You might discover that most of your business is coming from a completely different location than you expected. In addition, Google Analytics tracks the path that users take while navigating through your site. It not only tracks which pages the user is clicking to, but it also provides detailed information about how much time the user spent on each page. Seeing the different pages that users are visiting will help you determine if the content on your website is doing the job that you intended it to do, convert users into customers. There is no reason not to install the Google analytics plug-in on your website. It can’t hurt you, it can only help the conversion rate on your site. Even if you are clueless when it comes to analytics, it is important to have the history documented, so that when you hire a professional, you will already be a step ahead. If you need help installing Google Analytics on your website, contact us today. We want to help you increase sales by utilizing the free analytics plug in.