4 Key Reasons to Use Google Analytics for Your Start-up Sucess

Google Analytics is a tool Google developed to help webmasters understand their website’s traffic. This information is highly valuable, and you should not ignore it.

One of the key reasons Google created this tool was to help website owners provide its users with what they are searching for online. Not only does this help website owners understand their audience, but it also helps users have a better experience on the website that Google is ranking.  If you’ve been hesitant to use Google Analytics in the past, then you’ve been missing out on a valuable opportunity to increase traffic and gain an in-depth understanding about the potential customers that are using your site.

“Focus on the right message for the right people at the right time.”

Here are the key reasons you should use Google Analytics to help guide your small business’ marketing strategy.

1. Tells You Which Marketing Channels Drive Traffic

Google Analytics gives you information on the sources your traffic is coming from. For example, you may receive a lot of your traffic from social media, or it may be organically through search terms. Understanding where traffic is coming from can help you adjust your campaigns to bring in more traffic from each source, and even start driving traffic from other sources.

Let’s say you ran a Facebook Ad and at the end of the month, you see that you had a 25% increase in traffic from Facebook. You may run that same ad or one similar to keep that flow of traffic.

Another situation may be that you’re not getting as much organic search traffic as you would like. The next month you start adding content to your site optimized with relevant keywords. The following month, you see more organic traffic in Google Analytics. Your efforts were a success, so you know you should continue adding content the next month. This information can help you decide where to spend your valuable time and marketing dollars.

 Google Analytics doesn’t just tell you about traffic though. It can also give you information about leads and sales.

2. Shows You the Most Profitable Marketing Channels

A landing page with a conversion goal set up on Google Analytics helps you determine which marketing channels are the most productive and profitable.

For example, let’s say you set up a Google Ad and the link in your ad leads to a dedicated landing page. This page collects people’s information so that you can send them a free guide. Google Analytics will show you the Google Ad that sent people to the landing page and how many people completed the form.

You can also see referring websites. If someone links to your site and you have a form or product on the page they linked to, you can see the number of conversions.

With Google Analytics, you can also see how many users visit different pages on your website, and which paths they take from one page to another page. Seeing this data, and the conversion rates can help you improve the effectiveness of your pages

3. Gives You Information on Your Site’s Demographics

When you know your demographics, you know whether your marketing efforts are targeting the right audience.

Knowing who is accessing your website can help you understand what you need to do to get more of the right type of people to your site. If someone is selling an Android app, they want to make sure they don’t have people who are using an iOS device because those people are less likely to convert.

It’s important to know who you need to target in your marketing to make sure you’re not wasting money marketing to the wrong audience. Google Analytics provides you with information on the location, age, gender, and interests of the people coming to your site. As you look at the demographics and compare that data to the attributes of your target audience, you’ll be able to see where you need to concentrate your efforts

4. Provides Information to Analyze Your Best Pages

Google wants you to know which pages users visit the most and which pages they spend the most time on so you can make improvements to others, if necessary.

You can do this by going to the Behavior -> Site Content section of Google Analytics. For example, to see which pages are generating the most SEO traffic, you can look at Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages, and then view a Segment for “Organic Traffic.”

By looking at that report, you can see which pages are already generating the most traffic from SEO, and see how well they are converting. You can then make improvements to the pages to help generate more traffic and more conversions.