What is Google Analytics and why it is beneficial to use it for your business website?

Today, many businesses are focusing on content marketing in order to attract a clear defined audience. Google Analytics is one of the widely used tools to get all the data and monitor online traffic on websites, social tools, ads and videos etc.

Let us take a look at how Google defines their product:

“Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site and how you can keep them coming back.”

Whether you are selling products/services or building your brand, it is important to understand the behavior of your target audience. In today’s competitive market, it is not enough to have a small counter on your website footer for counting the number of visitors on your web page. You need a complete tool like Google Analytics that helps you to understand ways to reach your audience / customers or how to make it easier to server your current customers and win new ones.

How Google Analytics can benefit your business?

Back in the old days, any small business had to depend on the traditional marketing i.e. word of mouth, newspaper advertisements and brochures etc. There is no doubt about the fact that, this kind of marketing strategy always worked for small businesses and it still works. But, there was no tool available to measure the effectiveness of any marketing strategy and a business owner will always have to make an assumption about:

• How many people read the advertisement in the newspaper?
• How many people visited the store after getting the brochure?
• If anyone visited the store after reading the advertisement; what time they came in, what were they looking for or how long they stayed?

Google Analytics takes out the guesswork and helps you to measure the extend up to which you are achieving your business goals. In other words, Google Analytics tool is like eyes of your online store that keeps a track of all the customers visiting your site, their location, sources from where they reach to your website, how long they stay on your website, when they leave and how they are browsing your website.

Google Analytics is free to use

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google so there is no reason not to make use of it for your business website. There is no monthly fee attached to it and hundreds of tutorials are available online to show you how to use this tool. If you still want to invest money on some other similar solution (or tool) for your business website then go for it but install Google Analytics as well as it is free to use.

There is also a paid version of this tool offered by Google for one flat annual fee of $150,000 which basically focuses on large enterprises. The paid version of Google Analytics is “Google Analytics Premium”; which offers direct support, advance reports and account management etc.

Things that you can learn about your business by using Google Analytics

How visitors find your website – Google Analytics gives you all the information about the sources from where visitors are coming to your website such as search engines (like Google, Bing & Yahoo), social media sites or other websites.

What brings visitors to your website and if they are coming back or not – Google Analytics allows you to see the complete report on what keywords are bringing the potential customers on your website. So, as a business owner, it gives you an idea what are the trends in the market and what to focus on in order to draws customer’s attention. Google Analytics also gives you reports about the behavior of the visitors i.e. “New Vs Returning users” by which you can keep a track of number of new visitors and how many are coming back to your website.

You can improve your website – Google Analytics allows you to see the complete report of devices / browsers used by the visitors. This helps the web developers to make sure if the website is working fine on widely used browsers or not. Also, if a significant number of people are visiting your website on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, it is the right time to consider upgrading your website to support all screen sizes with a dedicated mobile site or a responsive design.

Interesting Facts

• 63% of Fortune 500 Use Google Analytics
• 56% of businesses rely exclusively on Google for web analytics

nopCommerce is integrated with Google Analytics. Ecommerce transaction tracking automatically connects your Google Analytics web usage data with customer transactions.

Author: Lavish Kumar