This blog post was last updated on 28/05/24.
When in regional Queensland, I get asked this question a lot: “Why Google Analytics is Important to Your Website?”
Google Analytics is one of the top, most powerful tools out there for monitoring and analysing visitor traffic on your website. It gives you an enormous amount of information about who is visiting your website, what they are looking for, how they are getting to your website, and more. It also plays a massive role in making data-driven decisions and improving conversions. Any business that wants to expand and grow their business using the internet (and one or more websites) should definitely be using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free Google product your web developer can install that collects visitor data from your website. This data is used to create reports that provide insight into how visitors are using your website, AND how to improve its performance (should it need it). Performance improvements could include things like increasing numbers of leads, enquiries and sales. All of which are called ‘conversions’ in the website industry.
There is an amazing amount of information you can find out when using Google Analytics and reviewing the data it collects.
An introduction to Google Analytics video is here:
There are also many more videos on YouTube if you want to learn more about Google Analytics v4. Some are here. Google themselves also provide a free beginner level course.
Why is it so Important?
It can tell you how your website is performing for your business and what needs to be improved and refined within your website to make it perform/convert better. The data doesn’t literally tell you how your site is performing, but when you work with a Conversions Specialist who knows how to interpret the data and compare it to other Key Performance Indicators, they can easily tell you if your website is working hard enough for your business or not… and then provide recommendations based on ACTUAL DATA, and not guesswork to improve it and turn it into what we call a ‘performer website’.
Here is a list of just some of the important data that Google Analytics collects and will give you:
- Where your visitors are coming from – very important if you’re targeting a specific audience located in a specific geographic area or country.
- How your visitors found your website – this is very important for determining which of your marketing efforts are paying off. It shows if visitors found your site directly, through a referral from another website (eg Twitter, Facebook), or from search engines.
- If they accessed your website on their desktop computer (or laptop), tablet or smartphone.
- What keywords were used by visitors in the search engines to discover (find) your website.
- What percentage of your website visitors return. This can tell us many things including but not limited to: how interested in your business they are, how memorable they find your website, how useful they find your website (if you provide free resources (and/or purchasable resources), useful blog posts, training, tutoring videos, eLearning courses, guides, etc). It can also tell us how memorable they find your website. Plus helps us determine if your website is helping with the ‘7 Touches Marketing Rule‘.
- Plus a LOT more data, should you want to view it.
All the data is stored within your Google Analytics account. You can access it at any time. You can even look at data for specific periods of time via ‘date ranges’. Eg. if you wanted to only look at data for February 2024 for some reason, or while running an event or marketing promotion. Or if you want to see if your overall website visitor numbers have increased over the years, or decreased, or stayed roughly the same.
It is powerful marketing data!
Here are some more additional forms of report data it collects.
We set up Google Analytics for all our clients (for each website we create). It is SUPER important. Any website provider who does not do this for their clients is not doing their job correctly. You might be surprised how many don’t set it up.
Your web developer needs to give you login access to your Google Analytics account so you can login and view the data at any time. If you want them to send you regular report data from Google Analytics that can be arranged too. There are a number of ways to do this.
If Google Analytics is not installed on your website we can do this for you. If you are not sure if it is installed or not we can also identify that for you as well. Contact us if you’d like assistance.
Jay Daniells has been doing advanced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) work for clients since 2010. He is an SEO specialist. He first started doing SEO work in 2005. He has also been creating websites full-time since 2003. Amongst things Jay is also a graphic designer, digital marketing consultant and creative person. His focus is helping businesses, community groups, clubs, charities, organisations and other entities achieve their goals. He is the owner of Green Valley Digital.