Google Analytics: a guide for small businesses

Get started now with this powerful web analytics tool

As the owner of a small business, you probably already know how important it is to have a great website. But do you know how well your website is performing?
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you learn how visitors interact with your website. Keep reading to learn more, and how it can be a big benefit to your business.
At the bottom of this article we’ve included a helpful glossary of all the technical terms (in bold) we’ve used throughout.

What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It’s the most widely used web analytics service in the world.
Using Google’s proprietary audience data and machine learning capabilities, Analytics allows you to better understand your customers and how they engage with your website.

Why should I use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is packed with powerful insights tools to help you learn more about your website’s visitors and their behavior.
Here’s just some of the information that you can find out:

• How many users visited your website
• What location in the world they visited from
• Their age, gender and interests
• What device and browser they used to access your site
• What search queries they used to find you
• How long they stayed on your site

You can change the time period of your data and filter using additional metrics for an even more detailed view of your information. You can also view real-time data to see who’s visiting your website right now.
One of the most useful resources for your business is to see how visitors found your website. For organic search, you can see the search queries people used to find you. You can also see which referral websites are driving traffic to your site — so if you use affiliate links or referral schemes you can see just how well they’re performing.

How can Google Analytics help me improve my website?
Google Analytics can help you understand the areas of your website that need improvement. You might have a blog with great articles, but your data shows no one’s reading them. Why? With Analytics, you can dive in deeper and learn more. You might find that your blog pages aren’t ranking highly for relevant keywords, so they’re not getting many pageviews. If this is the case, try making a few tweaks to your blog text to include more of the keywords you want to rank for.
You might notice you have a low session duration and a high bounce rate. If people are only viewing one page before leaving your site, think of ways you can keep them engaged. The longer visitors spend on your website, the more they’ll read and the more they’ll learn about what you offer — making them more likely to want to do business with you. At the end of every blog you could include links to other relevant articles that visitors might find interesting. On every page of your website, think of ways to link to other content that will keep visitors hooked.
We recommend linking your Analytics account to your Google Search Console account to get more in-depth search query data. You should also link your Analytics account to your Google AdWords account so you can track conversions.

How do I get started with Google Analytics?
It’s straightforward to get up and running.

1. Visit https://analytics.google.com/
2. Sign in and fill out the simple form
3. Add the Analytics tracking code to your website
4. Data will begin to be collected immediately
5. Set up different data views and start gaining in-depth insights into your website visitors and their behavior.

Google Analytics Glossary

Affiliate link
A trackable link from another website, where the affiliate receives reward or payment when a customer makes a purchase on the target website.

Bounce rate
The percentage of people who visit your website and leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site.

Conversion
When a visitor to your website completes a desired goal, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.

Keywords
Words or phrases that are used by search engines to match your pages with the terms people are searching for online.

Metrics
Quantitative measurements used to analyze and display your data in Google Analytics.

Organic search
Unpaid, natural search result rankings determined by search engine algorithms.

Pageview
An instance of a user visiting a particular page on a website.

Ranking
The position at which a webpage appears in the results of a search engine query.

Referral website
A source other than a search engine that referred a user to your website.

Search query
Words or phrases entered into a search engine by a user.

Session duration
The length of time a user spends interacting with your website.

Tracking code
A snippet of code that collects and sends data to Google Analytics from a website.

View
A snapshot of data in Google Analytics, which can be customized depending on what you want to learn more about.

Website traffic
The amount of users that visit your website.

At Different Perspective, we have over 14 years of experience building customized responsive websites for small businesses like yours. And then once your new website is up and running, we can help you increase visibility and drive revenue with targeted SEO and PPC campaigns.

Want to learn more? Contact us today to get started.

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