Why use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool that enables you to get more out of your website by providing you with website usage data which can be analyzed to discover problems with website functionality, online marketing opportunities, a measure of success for SEO initiatives, reporting on PPC programs. Google Analytics is a very decent web analytics tool which allows you to collect, analyze and action data through reports that are fairly easy to understand and interpret. You can measure how many website visitors are doing what you want them to do (purchase a product, register for a whitepaper, etc.) and you can find out the why’s and how’s that will help you improve your website as well as your online marketing efforts.

Google Analytics provides a toolbox with most of the essential tools that are currently used by beginning to intermediate web analysts. GA alone is not, however, a magic hat which provides you with everything you need. A fair bit of work is involved to make GA data meaningful and ready to action, which is where web analytics comes in play. That doesn’t mean that GA has no value unless you spend a lot of time analyzing data. By simply browsing through the available reports you can easily get a basic picture of what’s happening on your site and you don’t need advanced analytical skills to start off with.

 There are a number of initiatives that Google Analytics can help your organization’s marketing department with.

Website functionality

Quick views of a number of key reports in Google Analytics will show you whether your site is functioning properly and can be viewed/used easily. One of the essential tools that webmasters require these days, which hardly requires any analysis but provides a more advanced alternative to basic log tracking (usually done with applications such as AWstats).

Referrer data

Having a look at referrer data can give you an excellent overview of which sites are providing you with traffic and are potential candidates for marketing campaigns. The links your site gets (perhaps through the publishing of an article or press release that gets picked up by others) can be great indicators of the quality of traffic you get from other sites. Say, for example, you release some new PR with links to your site and a bunch of sites publish your press release and by doing so you receive traffic from these sites.

With Google Analytics you can easily see what visitors coming from other sites are doing on your website and how many are purchasing your products. If you see that site abc.com is providing you with a number of visitors of which a high percentage purchases your products, you’ll have a good lead for a potential marketing campaign. If you advertise on abc.com there’s a good chance that more of their visitors will buy stuff on your site.

Search engine and PPC data

Most businesses with an online presence have learnt the importance of attracting a good flow of search engine traffic to their websites. Through the use of Search Engine Optimization/Marketing (SEO/SEM) techniques, many businesses try to lure in potential customers by optimizing their sites to focus on particular, relevant, search keywords and by looking at the success/failure of paid keywords (for example, through the use of Google AdWords). If your organization undertakes SEO initiatives and/or invests in search engine advertising (PPC) you will want to know how many visitors you get and more importantly, how many of those visitors convert into customers (or leads, depending on the goals of your site).

With Google Analytics you can find out which keywords are providing you with traffic, and how much of that traffic is of value to your business. If you see that particular keywords targeted in your SEO initiatives do not provide you with easily converting visitors you can try to target other keywords, testing other options to see what works best.

 Google Analytics also integrates seamlessly with AdWords, which means it can pull data in from your AdWords program and this will allow you to look closer at your PPC investments, to try and optimize the ROI in this area.

ROI optimization

Google Analytics offers a large number of reports that will help you along the way if your aim is to optimize your ROI. You can track which marketing campaigns do well for you in terms of targeted traffic acquisition, which campaigns need improvement and which do not deserve any of your precious resources. You’ll also be able to follow your visitors through your site to analyze which pages work well and which don’t in your conversion funnel and how you can optimize these pages to increase ROI from within your website.

Web marketing optimization

With all the standard webstat data you have all the information you need to optimize your web marketing efforts using Google Analytics reports. Get to know your visitors and what they want from your site and improve your marketing tactics on traffic acquisition.

Web analytics

Google Analytics provides you with a basic set of tools that will get your web analytics initiatives going. Optimize and track your landing pages and conversions, email marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns and search engine marketing.