Insights on local government communication

Uncovering the Mysteries of Your Website Visitors

Written by Molly Rooney | November 5, 2018

In the digital age of Alexa, it seems like our technologies know just about everything about us from our most recent purchases on Amazon to the latest Pinterest fail that we created for dinner last night. With information constantly being collected, businesses can learn more about your every wants, needs and interests. One vital tool that businesses can use to collect this information is Google Analytics. Here we discuss the many benefits of using google analytics for your business.

Discussing the major benefits of google analytics, Digital Vidya describes Analytics as the collection processing, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purpose of understanding and optimizing web usage i.e. basically observing and analyzing a visitor’s behavior to a website.  Google Analytics specifically is a tool that provides valuable data about your website and easily integrates with Shopify and WordPress! Without data analytics, extending Geoffrey Moore’s famous quote, the businesses are deaf and blind, working in silos and without any real feedback; wandering on the web like a deer on the highway – waiting to die any moment. Google Analytics can point your business in the right direction and provides many benefits, however three stand out to us specifically.

The first (what we think is the most important benefit) is that Google Analytics is completely FREE! Yes Free, I said it. Google Analytics is free to both learn and free to use. There are of-course online Google Academy courses where you can learn Google Analytics for free in addition to multiple other sources/ channels which help you learn Google Analytics. Also, you can check out some good digital analytics training institutes, who provide personalized training and mentoring to help your grasp various concepts of Google Analytics and teach you how to use it effectively for real businesses.

The second benefit to Google Analytics is that it can analyze your sources of traffic. Diffusion Digital shows how knowing what the main sources of traffic are can give you insight to the strength of your SEO, your ad campaigns and other incoming links.  You can see whether your traffic is coming from your website directly, a newsletter, Facebook, Twitter etc. This information is extremely valuable in figuring out how to direct more traffic to your website.

The third benefit to Google Analytics is the information on visitors to your website. With Google Analytics you can find out what geographic location your visitors are coming from in addition to other factors such as age, and gender. In addition you are able to track their behaviors such as what devices they are using (desktop, mobile, tablet etc.) and whether they are a new or returning visitor. You can also see your bounce rate which is how fast your visitors leave the sight to give you insight on what pages are and are not effective.

There are many more benefits to using Google Analytics but using the information that you get from it is truly priceless. Knowing who is looking at the information you are putting out and how they are digesting it can help you better target your audience and make impactful website changes that in the end will help you build your brand! Pretty soon you will be on your way to having more knowledge than Alexa….someday.