Get Under the Hood with Google Analytics

Even though we are experiencing a strong shift towards social media in the recent years, the digital marketing of a business still starts with their website. This is the face of a company, its personality and history.

Your website is your property and you have full control over how you make yourself look to the world. For some businesses it is important to come across personal, and their About page to get a big chunk of visits. For others it is important to demonstrate their good reputation and former achievements. Or perhaps a website needs to clearly display the list of products and services and ensure it is easily accessible?

Whatever you want your website to do - with the right data and tools it is in your power to make it happen. Website analytics tools offer incredibly in-depth data to let you understand "who", "how" and "why". It also helps you to find out how to make it all better. The mistake many small and medium businesses make when using web analytics tools is to simply pull out reports with top level data and use them to judge the performance of their websites week after week. For example, the overall bounce rate of the site is a rather meaningless metric (surprise!), but if you analyse the bounce rates of your key pages that's when you can start drawing up conclusions.

I use Google Analytics every day to gain valuable insights into user behavior on our website, and have to admit still discover amazing new features on monthly basis. I also like to keep an eye on blogs about web analytics, Google Analytics tips and news on the latest features.

It's quite staggering the lack of depth when using Google Analytics by the majority of Google Analytics users, so we've offered 8 tips on how to increase the value to your business of amazing data you have access to through Google Analytics.

All these features are covered by the way in the Digital Marketing Institute courses, so if you prefer to learn them from an expert and do it in a group of other professionals where you could share your challenges with Google Analytics, then do not hesitate to sign up for one of our courses.