How To Get Started With Analytics

Who doesn’t want a more impactful website?

A strong web presence brings in new customers, reinforces loyalty with existing customers and presents your business as the authority in the local area can be a critical vehicle for growth. It’s important for your brand & bottom line.

So if you are looking to turn your website into a profit centre for your business in 2020, where do you start?

For me, the answer is always to begin with Data Analytics. Here’s Why.

Just one of the reasons the web has become such a pervasive and powerful part of our everyday lives is that it is a truly scientific tool for marketing. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, we can actually track a wide variety of behaviours and determine the effectiveness of one approach over another by comparing cold, hard data. All marketing and promotion is inherently subjective, but data analytics provides a way of stripping that subjectivity down to it’s bare minimum.

Simply put, Data Analytics allows for smart decision making and allocation of resources for the best return on investment.

Best of all – collecting basic Data Analytics for your website is FREE.

Anyone can begin making smart decisions about their web presence, learn customer insights, make their website more valuable, discover gaps in the market place & begin to improve their search engine ranking.

GET STARTED:

Step 1. Register your website with Google Analytics

Any web professional worth their salt will have already registered your website property with Google Analytics at launch. It’s free to do so and collects a host of vital data about how users find and interact with your business online.

To check if your website is already registered, you can try to login at https://analytics.google.com/ with a gmail or google email address. If this doesnt work, it does not absolutely mean that your website is not registered – it may be that you just do not have access to the data. Reach out to your web design or seo pro and ask if they may be able to give you access. They can then assign you rights to view the data being collected.

If your web administrator lets you know that you were not registered with Google Analytics, you can begin the process yourself provided you have access to your website’s backend.

Depending on the type of website platform you have, the instructions on how to add the code Google needs to collect information vary. Luckily, Google wants to collect all the data it can, and so has created a guide on how to add this code for all types of platforms. You can find this at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015

Step 2. Register your website with Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools)

Google Analytics does a great job of showing how people find themselves at your site and what they do once they get there. Google Search Console is focused on showing how your website and it’s pages perform on Google Search – arguably the most important channel for acquiring high value traffic and a source of new customers.

When paired with the data from Google Analytics, it can provide a starting point for making your website more valuable to more people.

Google Search Console is also free to register for, and your web pro may have also registered you for this powerful tool. You can similarly try to log in as above, ask your administrator for access, or register yourself should those two options not work out.

Google Search Console relies on verifying you actually own your website address (your .com or .ca domain name) instead of adding a snippet of code to your site. Usually, this comes in adding a simple .TXT record to your domain’s zone records, and can be done in less than 5 minutes. As above, Google has a handy guide on how to do this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9128669

Step 3: Read the Data & Improve your Website

So you’re registered with both Analytics & Search Console and have at least 1 month’s of data to look at? We are ready to start turning your website into a powerful tool for growth in 2020!

Coming up with an efficient and data-driven plan to capture as much of the market as possible takes skill and requires accurate reading of the data, combined with a competitive analysis of how to make the most improvement to your Google Search Rank. With that said, I encourage any website owner to explore the dashboards of each Google tool to get familiar with the data available to them.

Basic information such as the number of visitors and the locations they come from are easy to access and may already provide some ideas on how to improve the performance of your site to achieving your business goals.

Getting this far would put you in the top percentile of small business owners – you are already on the way to beating out the competition by making data-driven decisions and growing your business online!

If you have any questions about Data Analytics or registering your website, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Good luck!

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Project in mind?

If you have a project or website in mind or would like to learn more, I would love to hear from you.