Google Analytics: The Tool No Small Business Should Live Without

Today’s topic is a continuation of yesterday’s topic – cool, free tools I’ve been introduced to through my friend Pete.  In full disclosure I can’t say with 100% certainty that it was Pete that introduced me to today’s topic, but we’ve sure talked about it at length, so I’m just going to chalk this up to his column as well.

Today let’s introduce Google Analytics.  I sort of feel like everyone that owns a computer should be familiar with this tool, so let’s just say I’m writing this for you, Mom.  If you’re NOT familiar with this tool, read on!  If you own or manage a website, this one is incredibly, incredibly useful.  And free.

When you set up a Google Analytics account and paste a short few lines of code into your website, a whole new dimension of your website comes screaming into living color.  Who’s hitting your website on a given day?  How did they find out about your site…through a search?  By a direct link?  From another website?  What keywords did they type in to find you?  In what part of the world do they live?  What pages are the most popular on your site?  How long are they spending on a given page?  How many visitors are new?

And, of course, Google Analytics is linked with their paid product, Google AdWords, where you can purchase advertisements to run based on certain keywords.  But thankfully AdWords is not a necessary purchase to run Analytics.

I’ll never be able to cover all the nuances of Analytics in this short post but here are a few of the highlights.  I should mention that Analytics also has a pretty decent help center with lots of instructions and videos for getting started.

Dashboard – The Analytics Dashboard allows you to customize which reports appear on your Analytics “Home” page every time you sign in.  So you can get a snapshot of the items you’re keeping an eye on in a single screen.  You can also create Custom Reports under what else?  Custom Reporting!

Goals – The point of any good website is to get your visitors to DO something.  Create an account.  Purchase something.  Join a mailing list.  With Goals, you can set up predefined actions and track your conversion rates.  You can also define a specific path you want the visitor to take to reach each “goal”, so you can tell if people are falling off somewhere in the process.

Intelligence – Intelligence gives you an extra set of “eyes” on your website.  There are two types of alerts – automatic and custom.  Automatic alerts let you know when something out of the ordinary is happening.  Perhaps more people than usual “bounce” off a particular page.  Maybe your webmaster uploaded an erroneous page, unbeknownst to you.  Thanks to Intelligence, you’ve been alerted about this atypical visitor behavior and proactively found the problem.  It also has a cool sensitivity slider to allow you to get more or fewer automatic alerts.  Similarly, you can create custom alerts based on a specific metric you define.  This can be handy if you’re running a specific campaign and want to know when goals are being met.

Visitors – There are so many cool features of Visitors that you’ll just have to create an account for yourself to check it out.  Some of my favorites are the “Map Overlay”, allowing you to see on a map which countries, states and cities people are coming from.  One of my other favorites is “Visitor Loyalty”, allowing you to see how frequently your visitors return to your site.

So there you have just a FEW of the many things Analytics offers small businesses.  It’s a powerful and fun tool to use – just be careful, it can get pretty addicting!