If you have a website, and you care about what people are doing when they land on it, then you need Google Analytics. The data you get from having it installed is worth the $0 cost.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. (Wikipedia)
Why should you use it?
Because it tells you all kinds of stuff about who is visiting your site, and what they are doing when they are there.
Why is that important?
If you know what people are doing on your site, then you can figure out what is working and what isn’t working, and tailor your content to meet the needs of the user. Because if you give your site visitors what they are looking for, then they are more likely to hire you, buy from you, or contact you.
Example #1: From looking at your analytics, you might see that a lot of people land on your homepage, but they leave pretty quickly. That’s a high bounce rate. Often times a high bounce rate means that either 1) you aren’t getting the right visitors on your site or 2) you aren’t showing your site visitors what they want.
We would use this information to change the homepage to try to get people to stay longer. Maybe they don’t understand the navigation? Maybe they don’t like the way the page looks? We can start to make changes and assess the results in the analytics.
Example #2: You may look at your analytics and notice that you get a lot of traffic to one particular page or blog post. If you notice that one piece of content is being trafficked a lot, you can use that information to develop a plan to sell a service/product to the people who visit that page. Maybe you wrote a blog post about a DIY home improvement project, you could add some affiliate links to that page and try to harness that traffic to increase your revenue.
Example #3: If you have Webmaster Tools set up and connected to your Analytics account, you can see what kind of search terms are bringing traffic to your site. You can leverage this information to get better results. Say you offer handyman services, and you see your site is ranked 30th for the search phrase “local handyman.” You can see that you are getting some traffic from that phrase but you’re on page three, so you can start targeting that phrase to get ranked better.
There are all kinds of things you can do to improve your site and conversions based on what you see in Google Analytics. There is no downside to using it, only benefits to gain.
Amy Masson
Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.