How to Use Google Analytics for Your Small Business

Use Google Analytics to Get Actionable Intel for Your Small Business

Many of us understand that using Google Analytics to understand how our marketing efforts are doing can be a key to unleashing future success. Yet many people are overwhelmed by the incredible immensity of the data facing them. You should begin with answering the right questions: what are my goals, and what do I need to know to achieve them. Google Analytics can indeed be a perplexing mountain of data to decode, and without having a game plan you could get lost quite easily. Let’s take a look at some ways to know which metrics to follow, and how to use Analytics for your best advantage.

Which metrics do you need?

Each business possesses its own needs, or course, but here are a few common needs.

• Total visitors – The number of both “unique” (first time) visitors, and total visits, which includes returning visitors.
• Keyword phrases – Which keywords are people inputting to get to your pages? This is critical data, and will help you learn how to target your marketing.
• Most popular pages – See which of your pages are receiving the most visits.
• Visitors country of origin – Where in the world are these people originating from.
• Referral pages – Seeing which pages are driving traffic to your website is extremely valuable information. This could be from affiliates, video, images, social media and many more sources.
• Search engines – Which of the search engines are delivering the most traffic to your pages.

Use these advanced Google Analytics features to help sort the data

Three advanced features are incredibly useful with regards to deciphering and sorting the data.

Custom reports allows you to craft a version of Analytics to suit your business specifically. You select the information that’s helpful to you, and organize it in whatever way you want to.

Advanced segmenting provides you with the ability to view various segments of your traffic, like mobile or tablet traffic.

Intelligence events, much like Google Alerts, sends a notification your phone or email when anything significant takes place on your website, such as an up or down spike in traffic.

Don’t make the mistake of not using Google Analytics. Spend some time to make it work for you!