Google Analytics Tips for Beginniners
Ripple News • 31st Mar, 16
Online analytics are like search engines or online maps: everyone uses them, and yet Google is the only truly reliable provider.
Point is, regardless of the size of your business, Google Analytics provides you with multiple resources via which to build up your business.
But, you know, analytics, like most things involving numbers and stuff, are highly complicated; and for a first time user, it’s difficult to take advantage of every last little bit of the resources offered by this handy little online tool.
Of course, one doesn’t have to use every last little bit of it to really appreciate its full value – numbery technical stuff, after all, has a tendency to be pretty esoteric, for the most part; but still, running a business is a multifaceted affair; and you owe it to yourself to make full use of every resource that can smooth the process out.
Segment
Any business owner – or, hell, anyone who has to do anything, at some point – can probably tell you how valuable it is to be able to sort and segment your work; after all, one of the first principles of efficiency we learn is that stuffing things into separate boxes makes them easier to sort through afterwards. Simple stuff, honestly.
And it hardly matters what you want to sort – whether it’s users by geographical location, or sessions in which conversions occurred, or any of that other numberish stuff, Google Analytics is at your disposal.
Set Goals
Regardless of whether your site is dedicated to selling products or generating leads – in other words, whether it lets them place orders for your brand-name peanut butter sandwiches, or is simply dedicated to putting them in the mood for peanut butter – you’ve got to set goals for it. A site with goals get things done; a site without them sits there, possibly doing something for you, but probably not.
And Google Analytics is always on hand to help you prop those goalposts up. Goals for page views, session durations, custom events, the viewing of specific significant URLs – with Google Analytics, you can keep track of every single aspect in which your site is flourishing, floundering, or anything in between. Because, honestly, any of those things are preferable to simply watching your site sit there, hoping that it’s having some sort of impact.
Use Alerts
Simple, this one. Don’t let the poor name that Facebook gave to email alerts put you off – with the efficiency of Google Analytics, even the hassle of constantly checking the numbers can be avoided. Just set up an alert to be sent you whenever, you know, any of your stats hit a number that you deem goal-worthy. Handy, yes?
Link your AdWords Account
Simple stuff: when you make use of an advertising technique, you really want to make sure it’s working, and you’re not just pouring money into a future AwfulAdvertising.com feature. And simply by linking your AdWords account to your Google Analytics, you can allow yourself even greater insight into how your advertising efforts are performing, and even use your Analytics for retargeting with AdWords.
All in all, we’re well past the days when the only way to know if your ad campaign was floundering was to check if your sales were plummeting.
Explore
Really, though, we’d need one helluva massive set of constantly-updating indexes to really spell out everything you can do with Google Analytics. Really, the best thing you can do is explore it for yourself – you know your business, not us, and it’s really up to you as to exactly which of its many tools and facets is best suited to what you do.