Data- The most important information you need to grow your business.
It does not matter how much you spent designing your website. It does not matter how long your website has been in existence. In fact the older the website, the more important you need the data for your website.
Data will give you an insight into how many people visits your website (number of traffic), where they come from (channels), how long they stay (bounce rate) and where they leave (exist points).
All these information are crucial to the successful running of your business. Without relevant data, you will only be flying blind.
There are lot of analytical tool that can give you insight into your website. While most of them are paid, there is one important analytical tool that is a must have for your website- The Google analytical tool
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How To Setup Google Analytics
To illustrate this process, I will be setting up the Google analytics for a food blog; “foodprofs”.
Step 1: Sign up for a free Gmail account if you do not already have using the Gmail.com
While you are at it, Google will ask you to setup your Google plus profile. You might as well get that done now.
Now that you are done with that annoying step let’s move on.
Step 2: Navigate to the analytical home page. If you are on the same page and you type Google analytics, you may not need to sign but if you have signed out of your gmail account, then you need to sign in again.
Next is the access screen.
Step 3 : Once you can access your account, you are presented with the following screen.
What do you want to track: You have to pick the option of either a website or a mobile app with the default being “website”.
Account Name: The name you want eg food professional
Website Name: Name you want your website to be called. Here we say Food Professionals
Website Url: Enter the full part of your website eg www.foodprofs.com
Industry Catergory: Which niche your website belong to eg Food and Drink
Reporting Time Zone: Your location
Every other detail is already checked so you just click get tracking Id
A popup shows up asking you to accept the Google analytics terms of services.
Here change the location to your location and click I ACCEPT
Step 4: Get tracking Code
You will now be presented with a screen that shows your tracking code. You are to copy it and paste it into the head section of your website.
Step 5: Clikc home navigation to return to your home screen and you are presented with the Google analytics home screen.
Now that you have successfully setup your account immediately Google is able to crawl your website, you will start seeing stats and data about your website appear on the dashboard.
You can learn more form the Google analytics school or but here is a brief overview of some of the most important metrics you want to pay attention to as Google gives you insight about your website.
Google analytics metrics you might be interested in:
Google analytics contains tons information that can help you understand your audience and what you need to do to improve your website. Some of them includes
Audience Overview:
The audience overview tells you more about your website visitors. You get demographic information like age, gender.
Want to do when they land on your website and which pages they crawl? Just use the user flow chart to see website visitor’s movement on through your most important pages. With the user flow, you can see how many people land on a particular page and how many of them actually make it to your signup form.
Acquisition:
The acquisition tab tells you where your site audience comes from, which medium is sending traffic and what search terms are they using to find your website. If for example, you have been promoting your website on a particular social media platform and you check this tab but can find traffic from Facebook to your website, it might just be time to refine either your strategy on Facebook or simply dump it all together to focus on platforms and sites that are sending you relevant traffic.
Behaviour:
Do you know that site speed is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking your website? If you have an extremely slow loading website you can tell by visiting this section of your analytics. Just clicking on the site speed link will tell you how far your website loads.
Want an In-page analytic of your website content. You can find detailed information about each page under this tab
Conversion:
Conversions are king. You want to be able to setup Goals for your website. You can do all of that and just more under this tab
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