I’m always astounded when I meet a business owner who doesn’t monitor his website with Google Analytics or a similar program. The truth is your internet marketing campaign will likely fail if you don’t keep track of your visitor activity. Just how likely? We’re talking casino odds here!
Imagine if Save-on-Foods didn’t keep track of what customers purchase. How would they know which products to stock or what prices to charge? Similarly, how do you know what your customers are thinking if you don’t pay attention to them?
Google Analytics offers you a wealth of information: everything from where visitors are located to what screen resolution they’re running. You can easily identify the source of your traffic and what pages customers are looking at, but that’s just the tip of the iceburg. The latest version can even show you visitor activity, live, in real-time.
Behavior patterns will vary from business model to business model. Industries like online retailers will expect faster conversions than, say, manufacturing firms. But some metrics, like a high bounce rate, should be of concern to everyone.
Our goal with Google Analytics is to identify strengths and weaknesses in our online campaigns. If an ad or a key page isn’t performing well, then we’ll want to make the necessary adjustments as quickly as possible to minimize lost revenue. Likewise, if we see one of our products or services generating a lot of interest, we might explore new opportunities we hadn’t considered before.
But all this is only possible if you monitor your website on a regular basis and take advantage of the information Google Analytics is compiling. By “regular basis” I mean at least several times a week. Otherwise, you probably won’t see a return on your website investment, and the only one benefiting from your website will be your competition.