Do you know what people are doing when they come to your website? Do you know what brought them to your website? Do you know if they are taking the actions (donating, volunteering, signing up for your newsletter) you want them to take?
All three of these questions are very important for you to know about your website visitors. If you don’t know these things, and more, about the activity happening… then how do you know your website is doing what you intended?
Knowing what people are staying to look at or leaving as soon as it loads can be very valuable… but what’s the best way to do that without spending a lot of money? Google offers an online analytics tool by the name of Google Analytics. In this article, we are going to look at what exactly is Google Analytics and the benefits of using it.
What is Google Analytics?
With the help of Google Analytics, an organization can look at the statistical data regarding their website activity and use it to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing efforts.
Wait… this was supposed to be about my organization’s website. How did this grow into being about more than just our website?
For most organizations, their website is where all marketing ends up being pointed to. Facebook advertising… Google Ad/AdGrants… Printed marketing… They all typically encourage for the reader to go back to a certain page, like a landing page, on the organization’s website.
Now that we can agree the concept behind Google Analytics sounds helpful, what about the real benefits of using a tool like this. Let’s look more in depth at four reasons it is advantageous to use it for your organization.
Access to Free Analytics
Nothing good in life is free…at least that’s how the saying goes. Google Analytics breaks that rule. They provide users with access to a lot of valuable data about the activity happening on your website.
All this data is available for no financial cost to the user. Instead of investing money to access this data you will have to invest some time into understanding the data and what it means for your organization. Thankfully, the value of the time investment is well worth it. With the understanding of what the different data means, you will be able to go back later and more easily understand what Google Analytics is saying about the activity happening on your website.
Discover All Sources of Traffic
Knowing where your website visitors came from can make a world of difference. It helps you understand how well each of your different marketing efforts are working and which ones need some improvement.
Google Analytics is a great place to start understanding where people are finding you. This can be handy because it will help you have a better idea where you should invest more of your time and verify if your current marketing efforts are doing their part.
Here are a few examples of ways understanding your traffic can make a difference to future marketing efforts:
- Use the amount of traffic coming to certain blog posts to help determine which ones, if any of them, should be boosted on social media to encourage more people seeing them.
- Find out which social media platform is bringing the most engaged people to your website helps to know which platform works best for your organization.
- Understand the effectiveness of each keyword being used on your paid advertising to make sure the spending is as efficient as possible.
Uncover Keywords Driving Traffic
Keywords are groups of words people use on a search engine (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) to find information they are looking for. Taking advantage of keywords throughout your website and on your different advertising can help improve how often people find your organization.
With the help of tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console (another free tool that can share data with Google Analytics), you can understand what keywords people are currently using to find your organization. By knowing what people are typing in their search, you can make changes to your website and/or advertising that will help improve the quality of your visitors.
What exactly does that mean? If your organization’s mission is focused on stopping world hunger (primarily outside the United States), but someone finds you in their search for food stamps… they are not likely to be interested in learning about your work at this point in the time. If they are not interested in your mission, then they are not likely to want to be interested in engaging with your website. By staying informed about the keywords people use find you, it becomes easier to know of ways to improve your marketing efforts.
Create Your Own Goals to Track
Inside Google Analytics, it is possible for you to create goals for your website. Why setup goals? With goals, you can help both you and Google know how well you are doing on your website. Your organization can benefit from goals by being able to see just how many people are doing the actions you intended. For example, before you started your lately marketing campaign you were only having 10% of visitors signing up for your newsletter… but after sending out that campaign the sign-up rate increased to 25%. This can really help show just how effective your marketing efforts are in bringing engaged visitors.
If you have paid advertising (Google Ads or AdGrant), Google will put serious weight to this engagement from your visitors. The more people that complete a goal on your website, the more Google sees value in your website. That value shows Google your advertisements should be placed higher up on the advertising list for the same cost as you spend now. Higher placement without spending more advertising money? Now that sounds like a deal to me!
Conclusion
Google Analytics is a great way to have a more in-depth understanding of where people are coming from and what people do while on your website. With this understanding it becomes a lot easier to know ways you can improve your marketing efforts so they can work harder for your organization.
