As any small business owner will know, it’s vitally important to understand your customer-base. How people reach your site and what they do once they’re there is crucially important to ensure you are attracting the right audience for your product or service. Google Analytics offers unrivaled measurement tools for your business with cross-channel performance metrics giving small businesses invaluable insight.
But what should you do once you have installed Google Analytics on your site?
Here are four beginners’ tips for Google Analytics:
- Exclude your own visits
Analytics will track all visits to your site – including each visit you make. Filtering your own traffic can help make sure your data accurately represents how ‘real’ visitors are engaging with your site. To exclude your own visits you will need to know your IP address and ‘create a new view’ in Analytics that excludes internal visits. If you’re not sure of your IP, a quick search in Google for ‘what is my ip’ will reveal your address.
- Define your goals
Your goals will depend on your business objectives. You might want visitors to contact you through an online form, read useful information on a particular topic or make an online purchase. Whatever your objectives are Analytics can help track leads, downloads, transactions and so much more. Be sure to set up the goals that matter most to your business to track whether visitors to your site are converting as planned.
Visit Admin > Goals > + New Goal to create a goal in your Analytics account.
- Create custom dashboards
The magnitude of data available in Analytics can understandably be a little overwhelming; this is where dashboards can help. When reviewing the performance of your site you may only want to see a selection of metrics, such as new visits, unique visits, bounce rate and so on. These metrics can be added as widgets to create custom dashboards to directly highlight the data that is essential to your business.
- Set up automatic reports by email
Time isn’t a luxury every small business owner can afford. The good news is that once you’ve set up your custom dashboards you can schedule monthly, weekly or even daily reports by email. Next to ‘+ Add Widget’ in your dashboard will be the ‘Email’ option, simply add your email, a subject e.g. ‘Weekly Performance Overview’ and select the frequency and which day you would like to run the report.
So what are you waiting for? These four small steps can make a big difference towards understanding how visitors are engaging with your site.
Credit Notes to Editor
Blog provided by Jayne Davies, Online Marketing Executive at names.co.uk, providing professional online services for businesses and individuals including Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration and Email services. Make knowledge your key to success with free online business training from names.co.uk.
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