If you’re responsible for sale operations in your small business, you probably keep track of various metrics. For example, the number of returns, phone calls, or even how customers hear about you. If you’ve designed your website to be goal-oriented, as we preach so often here at Juicy Results, you can take metrics to a whole new level.
This is an example of some of the insight you can gain about where your traffic is coming from.
Google Analytics, the package we recommend, is just one of a number of applications that can track and mine your website traffic. Because it’s both free and powerful, it quickly has become the industry standard for small businesses (and used by many large organizations as well).
The great thing about Google Analytics, is you can decide if you want a high level picture or an in-depth understanding of trends, patterns and results. The dashboard and main page of each feature provides visual graphs and top statistics to allow you to measure your progress against your goals, while drilling down into the numbers can give you insight into new customer segments and help you discover shortcomings in your website.
We invite everyone in your organization to become familiar with your metrics and tracking, from the analytically-curious engineer to the results-driven salesperson. This understanding will help your team optimize your online business initiatives.
As the old adage goes, “what get’s measured, get’s done.”
What exactly is Google Analytics?
At it’s core, Google Analytics is simply a way to track, and then monitor and explore your traffic patterns.
There is a small piece of tracking code, not visible on your website, placed at the bottom of your web page code. Each time a user loads a webpage, the Analytics server is recording, among other things, the page, location of the user, type of browser and source of the visit (i.e. how they found you).
The second part of the package is the powerful and visually informative web interface. Through it, you can construct surfing patterns, identify why a user did or did not buy from you and even calculate a return on investment for each and every advertising campaign you run.
So, to recap, by simply recording each page that is viewed on your website, Google Analytics allows you to measure an unimaginable amount of metrics and goals on your website through it’s user interface, which is only available to you as the owner of the website (or whoever you allow access to).
Getting your FREE account
If you’re reading this link because you’re a client of Juicy results, rest assured that we’ve set up an account for you and installed the tracking code. You can skip ahead to some of the other articles we have on metrics here in the small business resources.
Google offers this product free (because effective and successful websites usually invest in MORE web advertising). Just sign up here, and then create a new website profile per these instructions. Google walks you through the process after signup, so you may not even need to reference those, but that link will help you add more website profiles, should you be monitoring more than one website.
Integrating tracking into your website
When you set up a new website profile, Google will present you with a small snippet of tracking code, maybe 8 lines long. You need to copy that code out and email it to whoever manages your website, or save it so that you can place it at the bottom of your web pages.
If you are adding the tracking code to your website yourself, you’ll want it to be the last thing before the closing body tag (</body>). Putting it at the end ensures a couple of things. First, the page will only be counted if the user actually loads the entire page. Secondly, if there is ever a problem with Google Analytics loading slowly, it will be after the user has downloaded the page, so there experience won’t be affected.
Make sure the tracking code is on EVERY page of your website, otherwise your metrics will not be complete and accurate. This won’t be too difficult if your website has a single footer file included by all pages, which is common in website development. Google provides full instructions here.
Once the code has been added to the domain (www.myexamplesite.com) that matches the profile, you can test that Google can see the code and is collecting information. There is a “check status” link at the top of your profiles home page that should have a green check next to it once Google has begun collecting data.
Now what?
That’s all you have to do to integrate an extremely powerful metric tracking application into your website. From this day forward, you will have all the information you need to start making better decisions about your website, optimizing to convert more visitors into customers and calculate your return on investment. It’s important to note that Google can not track information retroactively, so each day that you wait to add it to your site is another day’s metrics you will not be able to review.
It’s time to get in there and start understanding who is visiting your website and how they are using it. One of our favorite things about Google Analytics is that complete novices can get value and understanding out of it day one, and that value dramatically increases as you dive deeper.
We’ll be posting a second article soon on the basic features of the web-based reporting system. Keep an eye out for it.
This is an example of how in depth the information is about where your traffic is coming from. Google Analytics can show you which locations are visiting your website.