Why should your firm dive deeper into Google Analytics?

You need to know real information and numbers about people visiting your website and engaging with your content to ensure you’re using your online presence effectively. This information is available to you: Google analytics, and other forms of digital tracking, are accessible and can help you reach your online and offline business goals.

Why do I need to measure?

Your site is an investment. You spend time, money, and resources building it.  It represents who you are, why someone should hire you, buy your product or engage with your brand. It builds trust and brand equity. It can drive awareness, allows clients to find information, and helps you collect important leads for future business. It is, in many ways, the face of your brand. People can search your site off hours and compare you to others in your industry. For these reasons, it can be a key component to help you achieve your business objectives, and if you don’t know what works and doesn’t work, you can’t maximize your effectiveness. This is critical in today’s economy where there are many moving parts and only so many resources. It is in your best interest to get it right.

Once you know your site’s objectives, there are key actions that take place that tie back to a business’ objectives. How your prospects navigate your site becomes behavioural indicators for what they want to see in the future. Your analytics can tell you so much. For instance, a prospect who signs up for a webinar or searches multiple pages on your site is becoming closer to converting into a client, and it’s important to be aware of, and measure, this behavioural activity so that you can be better equipped to provide relevant timely content and information that your prospects need and want.

What do I need to measure?

In terms of which actual metrics and analytics you should be tracking, that depends on your objectives. However, you should at least know the basics such as:

How many visitors are coming to your website every month?
What landing page is the most popular?
What content are they searching for?
How many leads does your website generate?
How much time are people spending on your site?
Which page are they on when they leave your site?

It is always good to have intel on industry benchmarks as well, so that you can see where you stack up vs your competitors. You might think an average of two minutes on your site is not very long, but if the industry standard is less than minute, you are doing better than you thought. It is also helpful to know what content is the most popular, so you don’t spend hours and hours developing whitepapers only to find out no one has been reading them.

What does it cost? 

This is the best part. In the past, measuring ROI from marketing dollars was sometimes difficult and never perfect. You had to make assumptions. In the digital arena, you can figure out exactly what is working. The best part is that the information can be obtained with tools that are free, and are very easy to implement. You just need to know how to read them. You do need to spend some time upfront learning the tools and analytics, as well as interpreting the information, but it saves you time and money in the long run. Like most things in life, take the time to do it right the first time and you will be glad.

What’s next?

Getting the data is a great start, but simply gathering information is not going to affect your bottom line. You need to use the data to make improvements on your site. This can only be done when you have a better understanding of the people who are interacting with the site, how they found you, what are they doing on your site, and even what days and times are the most popular (this is important because you can launch content around the busy times) and most importantly, are they coming back?

It is important to understand the analytics of your website and evaluate the data on a regular basis so that you can gain a deeper understanding of your visitors. Websites need constant updating/maintenance based on the data from Google Analytics in order to really serve its purpose for a business. At Industrial Brand, we offer our clients a web maintenance package where we look at their website analytics on a quarterly basis and provide recommendations on how to further improve the site to attract the clients they want, and to keep visitors on site longer. If you want to hear more, please drop us a line at [email protected].

Also, read about how SEO can make your firm grow and other Google services we use and love.