Seattle businesses, why in the world are you not using Google Analytics?

How using Google Analytics can help you get the most from your website.

Google Analytics isn’t just a tool for monitoring how much traffic is moving through your website, or what your highest ranked pages are, or how your marketing efforts are performing. It's so much more! If your business isn’t using it, you are sorely missing out.

While it is important to know the amount of traffic your site receives, it is also essential to track where your customers are coming from, where they are going, and to discover why they are visiting your website over a certain period of time.

Most business owners only scrape the surface of the infinite possibilities within Google Analytics, if they are using it at all. If you want to get the most out of what your website can do for you, it’s time to dig a little deeper.

It’s not rocket science - if you can run a business, you can run Google Analytics. So let’s begin with the following plan and get analytics up and running on your website:

1. Establish Goals. Goals are one of the most basic features to use in Google Analytics - Go to Admin > Goals > New Goal to begin setting up your first goal. For most websites, conversion is typically the most important goal, and Google has numerous templates to choose from in order to efficiently track conversions. Once you get this part set up, you’ll be able to observe your conversion growth at a glance.
    
2. Develop Custom Dashboards – Head over to Dashboards > New Dashboard to begin developing your first dashboard. Once have chosen your starting template, you can include as many widgets as you would like. This is tremendously helpful for generating a consistent report or advanced view of your total progress.
    
3. Establish Custom Alerts. Most business owners do not have time to check analytics every day for abnormal activity. That is why creating custom alerts are so convenient - Go to Admin > Custom Alerts, and click “Create a New Alert” from one of the many different actions or performances. You can use the alert to monitor All Traffic or just a section of your traffic, and set it to give an alert when a particular metric rises or falls significantly within a certain period of time. The alert will send you a text message or an email when the requirement is met.
    
4. Setup a Filter. If you or any of your staff visit your website on a daily basis to stay updated, your visits could be distorting your traffic information in analytics. In order to eliminate yourself and your employees from analytics data, create a filter under the “Admin” panel - Go to All Filters > Add New Filter, and set a Predefined Filter to Ignore traffic from your website’s IP address.
    
5. Segment Your Target Audience. You might have several target audiences visiting your website, and it’s imperative that you distinguish between them - Go to Admin> Segments to develop customized segments that identify different audience groups. You can differentiate segments between gender, geographical location, age, technology used to gain access to your site, traffic locations and customer behavior.
    
6. Acquire a Real-Time Snapshot - Go to Real-Time > Overview to get a snapshot of your website metrics as they’re occurring. You will be able to view the amount of visitors that are currently on your site and how they are accessing your site.
    
7. Observe Behavior Flows. Click on Behavior > Behavior Flow to see a diagram of your visitors’ behaviors. This table can give you an excellent idea of how and why your visitors are using your website.
    
8. Examine Site Searches. If you have a search function on your website, you can utilize Behavior > Site Search to study data on what your visitors are searching for. Visitors who perform searches are more liable to convert than those who don’t, and if you can ascertain what your visitors are searching for, you’ll be able to recognize what they want, allowing you to air more content associated to those search queries.

These techniques still only embody a fraction of Google Analytics’s potential. If you use them productively throughout your website, you will be able to take advantage of some of the beneficial features Google Analytics offers.

Interested in how Google Analytics can make your website work for you?

Let us show you the many ways we can help you enhance your marketing efforts with Google Analytics. With years of creative, technical and marketing expertise, our team can help you reach your marketing and design goals with options you probably didn’t even know existed. We offer services in Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue and Tacoma, Washington. Call us at 206.384.4909 or use our online contact form to arrange for a free web design consultation.