Building a website isn’t science, but understanding your audience is. Collecting data helps you understand who your customer base is, what they purchase, how they find you, and what is effective in drawing them to your website. The best resource around to understand this data is Google Analytics. The team at Google went all out when they created this resourceful tool. It’s an expansive data collection platform that you can use for your own website, for FREE! 

If you’re not using Google Analytics or its most up-to-date version, GA4, you are missing a large opportunity to understand your clients.

Let’s review the value it brings to your business and how you can start using it today!

Let’s cut to the chase, Google is giving access to this tool for free. The most searched on platform on the internet built an amazing free tool to collect data and statistics that can tell you how your website performs including:

• how people interact with it 

• how long they stay on a page

• how they find you (via direct search, organic search, a link in an email, or from social media). 

This type of data can tell you where you should spend your energy when it comes to writing content for your blog, or spending advertising dollars.

All you need to do is sign up for a Google account, then you can create a Google Analytics account. Once you’re signed up, you’ll have access to set up your website property and then get a tracking code to add to your site.

Finding the code can be tricky, we suggest checking out this article, but in short, you copy a piece of code to the tracking section of your website (in the Website Builder area of the Zibster control panel), or you can add it to individual pages, forms, and even marketing campaigns.

Once the tracking data is on your site, your Google Analytics dashboard data will start to record metrics for your website. The data collected is very diverse. It includes behaviors, like how people search on your site, what pages they visit, and even how long they stay on a page before they exit or bounce.

You won’t get emails, names, or addresses from Google but you will get demographic & geographic location details, and can even see how visitors landed on your page (such as from a search engine or social media posts). This is a great way to understand how customers are interacting with your website and discovering you. This can also help you with localizing your search results. For example, you might be trying to get inquiries from people in Iowa, but instead are getting mostly customer inquiries from California and that’s not doing you any good unless you are a national brand. 

The information you learn from your website metrics can also help you redefine your search engine optimization (SEO) goals for your site to make sure you hit your target audiences.

For social media, Google Analytics is a powerful resource to see which platform people are accessing your site from. If you see 40% of your visitors are coming from Facebook and the other platforms result in less than 10% of your traffic, this could indicate you should shift your efforts to just that platform or that you need to try new techniques to engage followers on the other platforms. 

You may also notice that more people are visiting your website from mobile phones, so you want to check to make sure it looks the best on all devices (something Zibster sites do automatically). 

Acquiring this data about your website strengthens your business so that you can focus on where your business thrives and also learn about opportunities for improvement.

Seeing how your audiences interact with the pages of your website will help you design clearer messages and stronger pages. If you see a page that has a high bounce rate (when people quickly leave without accessing any additional pages of your site), there could be something wrong with it. It could mean that customers are not finding what they came looking for or your site is not easy to understand. You can conduct experiments to see what’s working, what’s not, and why. 

This allows you to explore changes and modifications to your website to help user interaction and hopefully improve actions and time spent on your website. 

Are people not contacting you? Maybe it is because you only have one contact form and it's on your contact page which happens to be your last visited page. Your home page and about page on the other hand may both get more visitors and they tend to stay for more than a  minute. If that’s the case, perhaps those pages are where you should add a form. 

Data gives you the ability to learn, react, and change something if it’s not working (and leave things alone that are working).

Data is important to any business. It gives you control over how your services and products are translated to the public. It lets you see how successful something is, or alerts you to what could be a failure, and it gives you information to help pivot and adjust your messaging, and even can help you learn where to focus your marketing efforts.

Knowledge of your customers and website performance makes you more informed and empowered to make decisions, and using a powerful tool like Google Analytics makes it easier.

There is a lot of data in Google Analytics to understand. Want us to do it all for you? Our SEO GO service pairs you with our Google-certified experts to help you create a game plan for your business. Having a professional in your corner goes a long way. Need help adding Google Analytics to your site? Give us a call at 844.353.3412 our team is ready to assist you.