Google Analytics - Your Friend

Why Use Google Analytics

A one of my blog readers recently asked me to give him some good reasons to get involved with Google Analytics. So I have put together a topical piece for your review. You can probably think of others and if so, please let me know. I’ll add and give you credit. The first reason is near to my heart and my business sense.

Google Analytics is Free

Monthly Cost: $0. Training: Free. From a financial perspective there is no reason a small business should not run Google Analytics. You can  spend upwards from $100 - $20k a month on other solutions, but for the small business, install Google Analytics, it’s free. There are so many other ways to spend that money. If you have issues with the installation, I will do it professionally for FREE, just give me a call.

Analytics Reports!

Google Analytics provides you with reports that include some awesome graphs of how your natural campaigns are doing. You can download these reports and set up a monthly review of events that happen, where visitors are landing on your website and where they go once they get there, plus much, much more!

Custom Reports

One challenge with some commercial analytics packages, is that you don’t have access to get to the data you want whenever you want. You must call the consultant, who then modifies the report (usually for a fee) and then you wait for the results With analytics, custom reports allow you to see your data the way you need to see it, whenever you need it. Most commercial analytics packages cannot do this on the fly.

Testing

Anyone who talks to me more than once knows that I like testing. Testing is one of the best things in the world and testing tracking methods is even better. The great thing about Analytics is that you can set different profiles to focus on specific aspects of your business. If you want to isolate blog traffic, you can do that. Would you like to review only traffic from Canada or readers from your newsletter?  Just set up a profile. Testing allows you to change what needs to be changed and accentuate that which needs leveraged.

No one can argue that Google sends the majority of traffic to websites. For some, Google makes up 90% of their organic traffic. For marketing, AdWords can be set up to send tracking codes to your current analytics. It just makes good sense to use it. Remember, it is all about trends and Google Analytics is evolving. My first rule in online marketing is to have Analytics of some kind. If you can measure it, you can change it. Have something running so you can plan, see trends, etc. I know some readers have a thing about Google anything but let’s face it, he is the big gorilla and he can be on your team.