5 Google Analytics Musts for Small Business
Here at Yellow Cherry Digital we love helping new and existing small businesses with their digital presence. We understand that running a small business is a busy process where organisation and task prioritistion are key. This can often mean using Google Analytics as a tool for your business can be overlooked, for reasons such as not having the time to learn about analytics, other more important things to do or believing that hiring SEO professionals is not possible for your current marketing budget.
We want to share with you 5 musts for Google Analytics that shouldn’t take up too much of your time but can provide you with valuable insights for growing and developing your business.
1. Get Your Filtering Right
Ensuring that your analytics are as accurate as possible, means your data is more effective. Adding filtering to your account can really help with this. Our top 3 filters for Google Analytics are:
- Removing your own traffic – this article shows you how to exclude your IP address from your analytics
- Removing Spam referrals – for more on this particular filter and how to set them up visit here
- Filtering not provided information – for a great explanation and a guide to making the most of your not provided information we reccommend this article
You can add these filters from within Admin in your Google Analytics account, ideally you will keep your original view and create a new view with your filters so you can revert back to the originals if for some reason your filtering goes arry (it’s the same old same old keep your original view as your back up!).
2. Figuring Out Your Useful Data
It is important to figure out what data is important to your business so you know what you need to track. Different businesses will require different kinds of information from their websites, for example if you have a guest house you will want users to book accommodation on your booking page; if you have an ecommerce website you will want users to make a purchase from your shop; if your website is promoting services you will want users to contact you via your contact form for more information or make an appointment if you have a booking system. When you understand what Data you want you can use this information to set up specific goals and understand how these goals relate to your website conversion rates. Paying attention to your websites conversion rates allows you to determine what parts of your website are working effectively and which areas may need improvement.
3. User Demographics
Understanding your audience, for full user demographics you may need to update some settings within your Google Analytics Account. Knowing who your users are is a vital part of your business growth and development. It allows you to understand if your audience is who you expect it to be based on current marketing, shows you who to market for future strategies. It also provides valuable data for product and service planning.
4. Session Information
Keep an eye on your average session duration, this means the amount of time your users are spending on your website and the amount of time the spend on particular pages. The longer users spend on your website the more likely they are to take action (convert) by making a purchase, requesting information or booking an appointment for example. Further useful session information is how many pages a user visists during a session, this can help you understand if users are engaging with your content and highlight areas where you need to make improvements.
5. In and Out
Figuring out where your users are coming into your website and leaving it is also really useful to your business. A Landing or Entry page is where a user first enters your website, this can be any kind of page such as a blog post, a product, a particular service to gain more insightful information on these pages you can:
- Assign urls to your different advertising mediums such as social media posts
- Track your most effective entry pages, allowing you to find out more about what attracts your users to the website.
- Find out the keywords that are bringing users to your website.
Exit pages are also important to pay attention to, if people are leaving from your goal pages such as the checkout or contact form submission pages then it means you are making successful conversions (Well Done!). However if your entry and exit pages are the same, it’s likely you need to make some changes and improvements to up your conversions.
We offer a range of SEO Packages to suit different budgets, if you want help setting up your Google Analytics to work effectively for you get in touch to see how we can help you.