5 Google Analytics Tips for Small Businesses
Data, data, data. Even when businesses didn’t have the technology to properly analyze it, they’ve always risen and fallen on data. Thankfully, we’re living in an age when even small businesses can hedge rather low-cost options to gather and parse data for effective decision making.
Small businesses usually don’t have the capital to spend on enterprise data platforms, but it’s actually not necessary. Google Analytics is one of the best options for data collection and analysis and you can even use it for free or for a low rate determined by the size of your business. Still, it’s often a huge mystery for small business owners. Every small business should be using Google Analytics to help improve website performance, digital marketing purposes, and to help ultimately increase sales.
1. Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Content’s Effectiveness
Do you know how well your website content is performing? You can gather this kind of information using Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics, there’s a section called “Audience”. There, you can see a general or more detailed overview of over half a dozen different types of audience-related data. Much of that data can be used to help gain insights into the effectiveness and usefulness of your blogs and landing pages.
For example, you can use the data for average session duration available through Google Analytics to better understand if your content is keeping visitors around long enough to make a sale. Simply pull up the “Audience” section in Google Analytics, then filter for just the “Avg. Session Duration”. From there, you can see if users are spending just a few seconds or a few minutes on your site.
The better your average session duration, the more likely visitors will go on to purchase a product or use your services.
2. Use Google Analytics to Understand your Geographic Reach
Do you know where your website visitors are coming from? Understanding your audience’s geographic location can help you optimize your digital advertising through social media and other channels. You can focus on drawing in more traffic from the locations where your business is performing the best. Alternatively, you can use geographic data to determine whether you’re targeting the wrong regions and need to shift focus.
Google Analytics offers large and small geographic data, from as high-level as which continents or countries visitors are coming from, down to which cities.
3. Use Google Analytics to Make Your Site More User-Friendly
If your site isn’t performing as well as it should be and you don’t know why it could be related to the user experience. You can use various data available through Google Analytics to capture insights into whether users are having a positive or negative experience with your site, which could be a key reason behind a high bounce rate.
You may also find your site is not working properly for certain devices and operating systems. If you’re getting a large amount of traffic from Google Chrome users, for example, but your site is only optimized around a mobile experience, you could be losing a large amount of potential business.
You can also use device-specific data to determine if you’re spending far too much time, energy, and money trying to optimize your site for devices that aren’t common among your users. A business spending money trying to keep up with Apple device optimization, while most of its users are coming from Android or Windows-based devices, may want to de-prioritize spending around those devices—or decrease its focus on advertising to users of those products if that matters for the business.
4. Use Google Analytics to Impact Your Marketing Channels
How much of your traffic is organic? How much is coming from social media posts or your backlinks? Google Analytics offer all of this data under one platform that makes it easier to determine where you should spend your marketing dollars.
For example, if most of your traffic is coming from organic searches on Google, you can ascertain which pages are drawing the most traffic. From there, you can optimize the content on those pages to help increase sales. You can also use traffic data to determine which of your traffic sources are underperforming and work to improve, or even drop, marketing in areas that aren’t showing effective performance.
Google Analytics draws in and makes available a wide range of audience-based data, including gender, age, location, and interests. You can hedge that data with Google Ads, or use it to make targeted social media ad campaigns. At the low price of free, Google Analytics makes this type of data available to any small business with a website.
5. Use Google Analytics to Target Specific Audiences
Google Analytics integrates with other Google Marketing tools, including one it calls “Optimize”. With Optimize, you can pull your Google Analytics data to create different versions of your website’s content pages and run A/B tests to check which formats or content styles work better. Using that information, you can then roll out updates to your core pages for increased performance.
You can also use Optimize to create personalized pages of your website that target specific audiences. Optimize can pull data from Google Analytics, which you can then use to create specialized pages that market to specific audiences based on any measure available in analytics, including visitor interests and location.
How to Get Started with Google Analytics
Google Analytics requires just a few minutes for sign-up and set-up. To get started using Google Analytics, do the following:
Create an Analytics account at google.com/analytics
Click on Start for free
Set up a property with your account (.e.g, your website)
Set up a reporting view to determine which data you want to see reported through Analytics
Follow Google’s instructions to add the Analytics tracking code to your website. This is also necessary if you want to use Google Search Console
Setting up Analytics is easy, but you may not have the time or technical skill to operate it or draw insights from it on your own. If you need expert assistance setting up and using Google Analytics to empower and drive your small business forward, contact Madison Ave Media for a complimentary consultation.