Have you ever wondered about how much traffic your site is getting? Or more importantly, where that traffic is coming from? Or most importantly of all where your conversions are coming from? If so, it is time for you to start using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free site tracking tool from Google. This tool gives you a great deal of information about the visitors to your site and their behavior once they arrive. You can see how much traffic you are getting, where it’s coming from, how long visitors are staying on your site, how many pages they view, how many visitors convert into buyers, and which keywords are driving in the most traffic. This information tells you in no uncertain terms what you need to change in order to get better results and affect your bottom line. This information can quite simply make or break your business.
Utilizing Google Analytics is something that every site can use to better its performance. I have clients asking all the time what they can do to further their sales and drive traffic to their site. With analytics, you can see your bounce rate for specific pages which will let you know which pages aren’t being seen as useful to a visitor.
“Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.”
Google Analytics also lets you run a “Funnel report”. This report will let you know how far through the shopping process your customers are getting and which pages need improvement in the conversion process. With this information, you can optimize the pages that cause potential customers to leave your site.
Google Analytics also lets you see where your traffic is coming from. This allows business owners to analyze which marketing source is working best. For example, if you have a yellow pages listing or a banner ad on a popular site you can tell which of these is more successful. You can also see which search engine you are most optimized on and which keywords people are finding you for on each search engine. So you know if you are being found for the keywords you are targeting.
So how do you install Google Analytics?
- Go to Google.com/analytics.
- Click on the sign up now link in the top right corner directly below the access analytics button.
- Create a Google account and log in.
- Click on the “sign up” button and follow the steps.
- The last step of the process is to add the tracking code to your site. You do this by copying a bit of HTML code and pasting it directly above the closing head tag in your site. The closing head tag looks like this: </head>
If you are a current client of Boostability.com make life easier by linking your Analytics to your Boostability Dashboard. Simply log in to your Boostability account and go to the dashboard tab and click the giant orange button that says “Grant Access to Google Analytics”.
