Why Use Google Analytics? 7 Excellent Functions the Tool Offers Your Business!

why use google analytics

Does your company have a website? If the answer is “yes,” understanding how to optimize your website, drive traffic, and convert visitors into customers is critical to success.

How can you know how your site performs and what to do to help it do more for your bottom line? Data and analytics. According to Forbes, 53% of companies use Big Data as of 2017.

It’s time to use analytic tools like Google Analytics to understand your website and your customers’ online behavior.

Why use Google Analytics? Here are 7 excellent functions that this tool offers your business.

1. Track With a Purpose in Mind

We mentioned Big Data, but what is it?

Your website’s data is information. The more you collect, the better informed you’ll be about your website’s performance.

With data, a tool like Google Analytics helps you understand how to improve design for marketing, better site optimization, and customer conversion. It does the work of collecting the information and tells you what your data means.

Be sure you have a purpose for collecting data and analyzing it. Gathering data without a goal in mind wastes time and expense.

Assign goals. Identify areas for growth. Ask money-making questions that support both long-term and short-term goals for your business.

Google Analytics works best when you tell the tool what to gather. Use the tool and reporting to answer those questions.

2. Improve Site Traffic

For your site as a whole, the biggest challenge is how to get more traffic, sales, etc.

Google Analytics tells you where visitors come from, how many visitors view your site, and what they see most. The tool also tells you how much of your daily traffic is organic vs. driven by specific campaigns and paid efforts.

Understanding SEO is one of the most important parts of driving traffic to your site. Knowing how people find you and what words they use to search topics relevant to your business is critical to driving traffic.

To improve conversion rates, you must know what causes visitors to buy vs. what causes them to leave or abandon a shopping cart.

After visitors get to your website or landing page, Google Analytics tracks the path they take from visiting to purchasing.

The best websites move visitors from awareness of what you do to committing to your product or service.

3. Track Every Campaign

If you run a specific campaign using banners and a funnel to drive visitors through a specific series of pages or actions, you need to know if your campaign is successful.

One of the best ways to use Google Analytics is tracking behavior for campaigns.

Build your page and URLs to track every link from first clicks on the banner ad or email campaign through the final desired destination and call to action.

Be thorough. Any decision point, text, or graphic can be the small thing that could sink or sail your campaign.

When you set up the campaign well from the start, the results are comprehensive and easy to understand. Google Analytics provides reporting to show exactly how visitors responded to the campaign.

4. Upgrade Your Design

Optimized website design helps customers find what they need from you.

Your site might be pretty. But if it doesn’t flow well, attract visitors, or convert visitors into customers it is “pretty” useless.

Using Google Analytics shows you the metrics for your site. Things like bounce rates, click-throughs, site speed, and other key metrics tell you what works and what doesn’t work about your site.

Make sure you apply Google Analytics statistics when planning the design or redesign of your website.

5. Reports in Real-Time

No need to wait days or weeks for results. Unlike snail mail or other offline reporting, online reporting is quick.

Google Analytics reports to your dashboard in real-time.

Whether split testing a campaign or rolling out a major website design, using google analytics tells you what’s happening right away.

This allows you to apply immediate corrections if something goes wrong on your new website when it goes live.

Or review your test results and go with the winner early in the campaign for best final results.

For ongoing reporting on important metrics, automate your Google Analytics reports to your email inbox. Automated reports keep you ahead of the game.

6. Understand Your Site for Multiple Devices

In recent years, using mobile devices for the internet increased every year–up to almost 50% worldwide as of February 2017.

But for your website, do more people come to your website using a phone browser? Or do most visits come from a desktop?

Which device converts the most sales for you?

Use Google Analytics to analyze visits and conversions between mobile vs. desktop to determine if your website is friendly for both your mobile and desktop users.

7. Add-On

On its own, Google Analytics is a robust tool. But it’s only the beginning.

Ready to up your analytics game? Take advantage of many available add-on tools–including non-google tools.

Plug in and monitor these tools through Google Analytics:

  • Enhance targeted traffic to your site with AdWords
  • Connecting Webmaster Tools helps you understand metrics including your site’s top landing pages and search queries
  • Push new content to your users with FeedBurner
  • Tracking video performance on your site is easy with YouTube
  • Sharing your social media sites to your website is easier with AddThis

When set-up properly, reporting from these add-ons and others integrate into your Google Analytics dashboard.

Why Use Google Analytics?

These seven tips give only a glimpse into the question of “why use Google Analytics?”.

We’ve shown you some of the best Google Analytics tips that help businesses from small to large corporations get the best efficiency and sales through their websites.

Many more uses exist for gathering and analyzing your website and campaigns through Google Analytics. This is only a start!

Did we miss anything? Do you have questions about what you see here or about something we didn’t mention?

Contact us and let us point you in the right direction.