10 Business Benefits Of Using Google Analytics

This is a guest post by Ran Nir, the founder of online marketing agency Conversion Counts and a Google Analytics Consultant.

Google Analytics offers free enterprise level analytics software for everyone which just a few years ago would have cost an arm and a leg. Google Analytics will be an important tool to achieve your business goals provided the initial configuration is carried out correctly. Although Google Analytics offers some very complex solutions, the 10 benefits below are my favourites to increase conversion rates and revenues. They all require a basic understanding of Google Analytics and in many cases no additional configuration.

1. Track your website revenue: The Google e-commerce module is very comprehensive, in fact it can be used as a simple stock management system. Both online and offline orders can be tracked using Google Analytics which will provide your business with a complete picture in terms of revenue by category, revenue by channel, revenue by keyword, conversion rate, average order and many more important measurements.

To enable e-commerce reporting, follow these steps:

- Log in to your Google Analytics account
- Click ‘Edit’ next to the profile you’d like to enable
- On the Profile Settings page, click ‘edit next’ to Main Website Profile Information
- Change the E-Commerce Website radio button from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’
- Get a developer to install the tracking code available from Google
- Schedule a daily email e-commerce report so every morning you can start the day with a smile

2. Analyse and fix your sales funnel : You can use Google Analytics in many ways, but the most straightforward is to analyse and optimise a sales funnel. If the goal is set correctly then each stage in the sales funnel can be analysed and optimised to increase conversion. For additional information on how to set goals, visit the Google Analytics support page

3. Locate website errors and fix them : Having broken links on a site is bad news for user experience, site revenue and for your search engine optimisation efforts. Using Google Analytics to find error pages (404s) is really a breeze.

To locate error pages, follow these steps:

- Make sure you have a custom 404 page (you should have one anyway)
- Customize the page title of your error page, for example ‘Sorry Page Not Found :: SiteName’
- Visit your Google Analytics account >> content >> content by title
- Paste your unique page title in the free text under ‘containing’

- Click on the page title to view your problematic pages

- Schedule a weekly or daily email of content by title

4. Improve content by analysing the bounce rate : For online retailers, a high bounce rate hits where it hurts – the bottom line. Bounce rate is the percentage of entrances on the page that result in the visitor immediately leaving the site = missed revenue. There are a number of ways to reduce the bounce rate, my favourites are:

- Get rid of low quality traffic if you’re paying for it
- Improve the page content and address some basic usability tactics
- Ensure accurate metadata descriptions so you’re not promising something you can’t deliver
- When selling a product, ask yourself is the price competitive?

5. Track the effect of SEO metadata and content optimisation : If one of your SEO goals is to increase organic search CTR (if not, never too late to start!), Google Analytics can help. Once your changes have taken effect and are visible in the engines, head to Google analytics and follow those steps:

- Compare two dates, before and after your changes, taking into account seasonal and weekly fluctuations
- For site wide analysis, head to traffic sources

- For page specific (probably more popular) head to content >> content by title or top content and locate the page
- Under ‘Dimension’ select ‘Medium’ to view total organic traffic or under ‘Source’ to view search engine specific

6. Track revenue sources : Best practice is to track and report on every channel which can turn into revenue. Using Google Analytics URL Builder it’s easy to assign a unique trackable URL or Tag URL as some people call it. Once the URL is tracked, you can analyse revenue, bounce rate, page views etc and start spending more cash where it matters. 

7. Track outbound links : If you link out from your site or blog, make sure you add onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/link/linkname’); “ It’s nice to know where your users are going to.

8. Compare historical data : One of my favourite features in Google Analytics is the ability to compare historical and seasonal trends. With e-commerce websites I use this information to better understand customer behavior and shopping habits so the right offer is always available at the right time. New offers can be compared to historical offers so your business can see what’s working and what’s not. Great for comparing seasonal keywords, traffic sources and more.

9. Manage sub domains and directory separately : This feature makes it easy to analyse and report, especially for websites with large folders and many pages. If you run a large website, this might be the only way to really turn raw data into actionable information. For additional information on tracking sub domains, visit the Google Analytics support page 

10. Reports by email : A great feature for businesses who like to stay 100% on top of things and get involved as much as possible. Using Google Analytics you can configure different reports to be sent to different people in the company, resulting in less manual work for yourself and happy customers.