Top 3 Benefits of Using Website Analytics
Let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you know how often people are visiting your website? Do you know what they are looking at? Do you know how they even found your website in the first place?
If you answered yes to the questions above, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back and continue on with your day. If you answered no and you’re not sure why it’s even important, grab your favorite beverage, settle in, and keep reading.
If you’ve taken the time to create an online home for your business, that’s fantastic. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that having a website today is as important as it ever has been for small businesses. When you were designing and building your website, you probably spent a lot of time deciding what to put on your website and creating that content. After you hit the publish button (this is simplifying the launch process, but you know what I mean), have you ever wondered if your hard work paid off? You could go around reaching out to your clients to see what they think of the website (and actually, I suggest doing that) but what about the people who didn’t become clients? That’s useful information too.
By tracking your website performance using analytics software (like Google Analytics), you get to essentially see the effectiveness of your website. You get to see if your hard work is paying off and if it isn’t, where the opportunities lie to improve.
Top 3 benefits of using website analytics
#1 Identify where your traffic is coming from
By using website analytics you can see how people got to your website in the first place. They might be Googling your name or a keyword related to your business, maybe they found you on Facebook, or perhaps you paid to appear within an online directory and people are finding you there. By monitoring the sources of your traffic you are better able to make decisions about where to allocate your time and dollars when it comes to marketing your business online.
#2 Find out which content performs the best
“Remember that blog post you wrote last year about a topic that you’re really passionate about? Did you know that it’s now the second most visited page on your website?” I recently had this conversation with a client of mine after we had done an analysis of what pages were being viewed the most on her website. A blog post that had been on her website for over a year had recently started ranking in Google search results and was now generating a lot of traffic to her website. This information is useful to know because it can help to show you what content is the most interesting and useful to your audience, which can help direct your content generation efforts, as well as your future offerings.
#3 Get to know your visitors
When you use a website analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can start to track things like the age, gender, geographic location, and interests topics of your visitors. Having demographic information about the visitors to your website is valuable market research that can benefit your marketing strategies. For example, if the majority of your website traffic is between the ages of 20 - 24, you might want to explore using social media platforms that reach this audience, like TikTok. Or if your business has a brick and mortar location, but you're noticing that a lot of your website traffic is coming from places other than the city you operate in, you might want to explore eCommerce as a way to sell to this audience.
Which Website Analytics tool should you use?
Now that you know the benefits of having a website analytics tool installed on your website, you might be wondering what tool you should be using.
My personal favourite website analytics tool, and the most popular one on the market, is Google Analytics (GA). It’s completely free to use and once it’s set up, is relatively easy to use. One thing to keep in mind with GA is that it doesn’t retroactively track traffic, which means the sooner you can get it installed on your website, the better.
If you are looking for help with installing and using Google Analytics to track your website traffic, check out my half-day Design Intensives. During a morning or afternoon intensive, I can help you get set up on the full suite of Google platforms like Google My Business, Google Analytics, and Google Search console so you can start improving your SEO and see where your traffic is coming from.
