7 Ways Google Analytics Will Improve Your Small Business Website

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Email Zip 7 Ways Google Analytics Will Improve Your Small Business Website Karlee Weinmann | Sep. 24, 2011, 9:48 AM | 496 | 1 A A A   xEmail Article From To Email Sent!You have successfully emailed the post.

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Analytics software is essential for any online business: it helps you understand ways to reach your audience and drive traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is one of the easiest ways to do this, and is especially helpful for the eternally busy small business owner or the on-the-go blogger.

It allows you to access both general statistics and minutiae in detailed, comprehensive reports. And of course, it includes all the basic specs, like how many visitors you're getting, and lets you refine your information based on date range.

Here are 7 things Google Analytics will tell you about your website:

1. The Browsers and Operating Systems Your Visitors Use

Whether they're coming from Internet Explorer or Chrome, Analytics will tell you. Your website's report will show a breakdown of which browsers are used and how frequently, This feature is useful because sometimes web features are incompatible with certain browsers and operating systems. If a significant chunk of your visitors are using a system that doesn't suit your website, it might be time for you to troubleshoot. Second, browser choice says a lot about your visitor base. If most of them are using a boilerplate program, like Internet Explorer or Safari, your site should be extra user-friendly and easy to navigate. Newer browsers with more bells and whistles, like Chrome, signal net-savviness.

2. What, Specifically, Isn't Keeping People Interested

It's good to know where your visitors are flocking, but it's perhaps more important to know which page of your website they're viewing when they click away to another site. Funneling resources to features that aren't captivating users is clearly not a smart business move, and Google Analytics can help you avoid making that mistake. By showing you the Top Exit Pages of your website, the program shows you the frequency at which web visitors jump ship navigate elsewhere, all broken down by the individual pages of your site. Based on that report, you can decide whether those ill-trafficked parts of your website should be scrapped or just retooled.

3. What Exactly Draws People To Your Site

Very likely, your Google Analytics Keywords report will list a collection of words and phrases familiar to your organization as the main drivers to your site. But the rate for each of those terms, especially when cross-referenced with the feature that shows how many new visitors are logging on versus returning ones, can be substantially useful in developing a marketing strategy. If you know what's pointing people to your site, you can work backward -- explore advertising opportunities with sites that focus on related topics or, if it makes sense, gear your homepage toward the subject matter that's drawing people in. If the point is to captivate visitors and keep them clicking around your site, this tool is a most valuable one.

4. How Many People Just Aren't Interested At All

Your site can have all the hits in the world, but if people aren't finding their way to your site and staying there to explore, it's tough to foster growth online. To help you better understand how many people are coming to your site to stay, Google Analytics offers you a Bounce Rate breakdown. So what's Bounce Rate? It's the proportion of your website's visitors that navigate away without clicking through to a second (or third, or fourth) page. True, you can tally that person's visit as a hit to your site. But there's no lasting power there, and a high Bounce Rate indicates your site isn't making a very strong impression. Check out the ultra-useful Bounce Rate among first-time visitors, perhaps the purest form of the metric because it deals with visitors who are ostensibly entirely unfamiliar with your website.

5. How Much People Are Poking Around

The Depth of Visit function sounds a little Big Brother-esque, but it's important for you to know how many pages people are viewing each time they head to your site. This feature shows the proportion of visitors that view one page, two pages, three pages, and so on. If typically people aren't looking at more than one or two pages per visit, it might be time for a redesign or at least a reorganization of content.

6. Whether People are Viewing On The Go

The ubiquitousness of smartphones and tablets means you need to keep up with that technology. If a significant portion of your website's visitors are finding you on their mobile devices, as Google Analytics can show you, you need to be sure your website is mobile-friendly and accessible. In cases where this feature shows you a sizable enough crop of visitors are seeking you out on such devices, it could be worth it for you to explore building a site specifically designed for use on them.

7. When You've Hit A Million Clicks

...or any other myriad benchmarks you've decided are important. From number of clicks and visitors to increases and decreases in traffic, the Alerts feature of Google Analytics provides you instant updates (which can be sent to your phone) to let you know when you've achieved them. This function could help you mark milestones, like when you finally reach that million-visitor mark, or realize you're in the danger zone, like when the number of unique visitors drops by half. 

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Receive email updates on new comments!cvszEmail1 Comment 0 1 Flag as Offensive paras on Sep 24, 11:42 AM said: Nothing is free in this world..remember this before using any free tool for your site analysis purpose. Certain service providers are known to use your site data for their benefit without any upfront information. Reply Join the discussion with Business Insider
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Don't Outsource Your Website If Your Website Is Your Business

I learned the hard way that my business was actually a technology business which just happened to sell music as its content. The fact that we were focused on music was insignificant because the challenges we faced were technological and similar to sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Skype and eBay. These problems arise from servers, scalability, code optimization, search engine results, conversion ratios, decreasing ad revenues, and have nothing to do with music. If I could start over, I would start by focusing on the technology itself, build a great technical team to support it and then work the music into the equation last.

Customers never see your brand the same way you do

I started Audimated.com because I was an independent musician who needed help promoting and marketing my music. I had picked up a lot of skills and tricks along the way and wanted to build a business which would help other artists be successful in the same way that I had. The problem I ran into was that each artist defined success differently. I figured that a website which helped artists make money with their music would be appealing to artists because that is what appealed to me, but after launching the site I quickly realized that making money was not how most artists defined their success as musicians. The majority of independent artists value exposure and reaching new listeners higher than making money from their music, which was not what I expected.

The lesson? Build your branding around what your customers value,  not around what you assume they value. Your business may be your "baby", but you need to be flexible enough to make adjustments to your logo, message and branding to reflect what your customers are interested in and need. Create focus groups, distribute surveys and get a feel from your potential customers what your next big idea means to them. Make sure that your vision for the business and your brand are aligned with theirs or you will likely miss the mark entirely. You need to match what your business intends to do for its customers with what those customers believe they need.

Less is almost always more

One of the most valuable and simplest lessons I have learned as an entrepreneur is to keep it simple. Audimated.com launched with far too many features and as a result confused users and left them wondering what the site was asking them to do. I wanted users to fill out data about their musical preferences and upload music, but that feature was lost among the other ten features users were able to access. As a result, many of our initial users experienced "decision paralysis" when being presented with so many buttons to click and options to choose from. This lead to incomplete data and many users creating accounts which didn't have music or photos.

All the extra features caused additional support problems as well. If you offer 10 different features, that's 10 moving parts that need to servicing and maintenance. Users will have questions about these features and they will need help using them. We didn't have the staff to address this growing problem and our users began to get frustrated by the time it took to get a response from support. Our developers became overworked fixing the small bugs that came from the use of these features. As we began to grow it became clear that having these extra features was more of a hassle then a benefit.

Since launching, we have reduced the number of features available on the site to address this problem. We dropped things that were auxiliary and focused on the core of what our service provides: the music. A much higher percentage of our users are completing their profiles and using the services, rather than being distracted by our extra features and being confused about to what to do. Our support staff is able to quickly address issues, our engineers have less bugs to worry about and have our existing features working better, and overall customer sanctification has increased. The lesson is to do less things at a higher level than a bunch of things at an average level. Your users, staff and bottom line will thank you.

Lucas Sommer started three successful music business companies which he continues to own and operate profitably. His newest venture is Audimated.com, a game-changing site that is revolutionizing the independent music scene.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (Y.E.C.) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The Y.E.C promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.

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