As with a physical storefront, it is important to monitor the progress a website makes once it is online. Think about it as an online version of your store. Just the way you go to your store every day, monitor customers, attend to their needs, answer questions and even sell items, your website should be attended to. However, since website is an entity somewhere in the cyberspace, a dimension that lacks touch and feel, it can take a backseat in terms of getting attention.
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that helps business owners track practically every aspect of their website. Among many other metrics, Google Analytics furnishes business owners the following important details:
- Number of people are visiting their site
- Geographic location of the users
- The web-pages they visited,
- The time they spent browsing the site
- The device they used to access the website (computer, smartphone, etc.)
- The time of the day when the users accessed the website
This is just some of the information that Google Analytics provides. You can read a more extensive list of features Google Analytics provides below. However, these few important metrics can help a business owner in knowing how their website is faring in the cyberspace.
Just the way you monitor your physical storefront, it is important to monitor your website. After all, it is an online representation of your business. It plays a vital role in making a statement to your existing and prospective customers. So, Google Analytics can help you strategize your business growth plans. For instance, if you see that your visitors are spending a lot of time on a specific web-page, you might want to add promotional info on that page. If you find that your visitors are coming from a specific city, you might want to advertise more there. If Google Analytics tells you that most of your visitors are using a smartphone to access your site, you should check if your website design is mobile-friendly. And so on and so forth. Paying close attention to the analytical data that Google Analytics furnishes can help a business owner formulate their business strategies to the last detail.
Apart from the features described previously, here is a detailed list of Google Analytics’ prominent features. Do note that Google Analytics is constantly adding new features and we recommend signing into your Google Analytics account regularly to stay abreast of the changes that Google may roll out. The dashboard of Google Analytics allows you to view the location, traffic patterns, customer behavior, as well as performance for your website. Here’s a list of some useful Google Analytics’ features.
Google Analytics provides general information pertaining to website visitors. So, it will tell you where the city from where a visitor came from, but not the visitor’s address. It will tell you that the visitor used a smartphone to access your website, but not the visitor’s phone number. Google takes user privacy very seriously and so rest assured that you are not intruding on your visitors’ privacy.
Google Analytics is easy to set up and free to sign up. All that you need is a Gmail account, which is required to sign up for Google Analytics. Once you sign up for Google Analytics, a code snippet is automatically generated, which can be simply copied and pasted in your website’s code. It takes only a few minutes to set it up. If you have a programmer developing your site, make sure that you let him know that you would like to set up Google Analytics for your site.
With a list of such powerful abilities, Google Analytics is a must have for all businesses that have a website. After all, there is no point in having a website and not monitoring its progress. Do you think Google Analytics is an important tool? Have you used Google Analytics before? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.