Do you feel more confused after launching your new website than before, with so many different tools and information available? Don’t worry, we will help you with the most important one! Google Analytics, a fantastic tool which gives you such valuable information with various reports. To help you understand and make the most of them, we will walk you through some easy tricks so you can master Google Analytics.
1. Focus on the most relevant KPIs
To make Google Analytics meaningful to your business you need to establish key performance indicators – KPIs. Having high traffic and many visitors on your website could be great, but do not focus only on that. Contrarily, it’s easy to get distracted by all sorts of metrics and information that Google gives you. Just make sure you follow the basic principle of 5 to 10 KPIs, and you will be fine.
2. Configure Google Analytics
After you established the KPIs, it’s important to properly configure Google Analytics and measure these essential aspects of your business. This tactic will give you the necessary information and suggest many additional instruments to analyse your users’ activity and behaviour. Some essential elements to consider are to track events and campaigns, use analytics for e-commerce, track searches on the website, enable demographics and interests, etc.
3. Custom Reports and Dashboards
Google Analytics allows you to create your dashboards so you can easily access the most relevant data. Spend some time setting up dashboards that are bespoke to your business as this would be a valuable resource. Alternatively, you can also use Solutions Gallery which will give you templates submitted by other users and could be a useful alternative to start your analytics.
4. Review Reports
Google Analytics and any reports could be useful only if you review them regularly. The insights themselves could help you if you are ready to track performance and make changes. Make sure you keep an eye on the dashboards especially if you have made any recent amends. No matter how hard we try to do the best for our business, some changes could negatively affect the performance of our website. Checking the reports frequently will give you the opportunity to prevent any damage on time.
5. Measure past performance
Compare your current results to your historical data to get insights into what works well for your business. Google Analytics can usually give you data for the past 30 days. If you use ‘compare to’ tick box, you can compare your current results with any specific period in the history. Past results can tell you if you’ve made positive changes or you need to reassess your strategy.
Wrap-up
There is no doubt Google Analytics is extremely important for your success and an excellent tool that gives you valuable insights. The key points we have mentioned above will provide an excellent base to start with and develop further. One of our recent projects, Elite Acoustic Solutions, Newcastle based specialist in sound masking products, actively uses google analytics. Elite Acoustic recently launched their new website and use google analytics to keep track on their performance and improve their strategy. If you have implemented the steps above already, but you feel something is missing, contact us for a friendly consultation!