Who's buying from your website? An intro to Google Analytics.
- 1. Intro to Google Analytics From the Small Business Growth Strategies Series Presented by
- 2. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” - John Wanamaker
- 4. The data Wanamaker was lacking is now readily available, thanks to analytics tools!
- 5. As a small business owner, you should be measuring everything you can, and most business decisions should be based on data.
- 6. Google Analytics is the most popular. Allows you to measure: • Visits • Page Views • Bounce Rates • Time Spent on Site • Marketing Campaigns • & More
- 8. Unique Visitors Refer to the number of distinct individuals viewing a website. For example, if one person views your website twenty-five times, it counts as twenty-five views but only one unique visitor.
- 9. Bounce Rate Calculated by measuring the number of people who leave a website after viewing the first page divided by the total number of website visitors. Rule of thumb: the lower the bounce rate, the better.
- 10. Conversions Logged when a visitor completes a goal you’ve established. (Goals and Funnels are explained later on in the newsletter.)
- 11. Types of Traffic • Direct– Visitors enter URL directly into their browser. • Referred – Directed from another website. • Search Engine– Resulting from showing up in search engine results pages.
- 13. The Audience tab allows you to determine where your visitors live, their age and gender, how they got to your site, what devices they’re using and much more.
- 14. The Overview page shows you statistics like the number of unique visitors, average visit duration and bounce rate.
- 15. Demographics and Interests break down the age, gender and interests of your viewers. This information is critical to understanding your customers.
- 16. As you go through the other sections, you’ll learn more and more about your visitors. For example, in the Geo section you’ll be able to see where your visitors live. If you’re a local brick and mortar store, it’s important to have a local audience. If you’re an ecommerce platform, you’ll likely want a more geographically diverse customer base.
- 17. Campaigns
- 18. Goals Google Analytics is all about measuring visitor activity, so naturally you want to set up Goals in order to measure your success.
- 19. Goals Every time a user completes a defined goal, a Conversion is logged on your account. Google breaks goals up into these four categories.
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- 21. Goals Click on Admin ! Goals ! New Goal. For this example, the full URL destination will be www.NewSmallBusiness.com/contact.html.
- 22. Goals Step 1 You need to choose the type of goal you’re setting up. For this example, we set up a destination goal. Since our goal is to get more visitors to the contact page, we simply named it that.
- 23. !
- 24. Goals Step 2 Choose “Equals to” and enter /contact.html, the page we’d like visitors to end up on.
- 25. !
- 26. Goals Step 2 There is also a Value option for correlating monetary value with goals. If new customers spend an average of $100 and 10% of new visitors end up becoming customers, give each visit a $10 value.
- 27. Funnels The paths that you want visitors to take are referred to as Funnels. For this example, let’s say we want a visitor to go from the Home page to the About page to the Contact page.
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- 29. Funnels You’ll notice that the Required option is off. This is something that often confuses people. If you turn the required button on, it means that visitors must start from the Home page to be included in the funnel.
- 30. Funnels Now click on the Reporting Tab at the top of your Google Analytics page. Go to Conversions and click on Funnel Visualization to check your progress. There’s no data yet since we just set it up, but this is what the funnel looks like.
- 31. There’s no data yet since we just set it up, but this is what the funnel looks like. !
- 33. Analytics & AdWords Linking Google Analytics to your AdWords account (covered in the last newsletter) will automatically track the behavior of visitors who end up on your website as a result of AdWords campaigns.
- 34. Analytics & AdWords If you’re interested in linking the two accounts, Google describes the easy 12-step process here.
- 35. Conclusion
- 36. Many of the problems businesses, particularly small businesses, have historically struggled with can be simplified, and in many cases solved, by understanding customer tendencies. Google Analytics is one of the best tools for finding and analyzing that information. Conclusion
- 37. As always, we hope this information has been valuable and that this series is helping your small business grow. If you’d like suggestions for more specific resources or have any questions, don’t hesitate to shoot us an email. Conclusion
- 38. “We hope you found this informa2on useful. If there are any other topics you’d like to see us cover, please let us know. And if taking this approach helps your small business succeed, we’d love to hear about it. You can reach us at support@acuityscheduling.com!” Acuity Scheduling @AcuitySchedulin
- 39. Acuity Scheduling is an online scheduling platform that saves thousands of small businesses time by allowing their customers to book appointments online, on their own time, at any time, from anywhere in the world. For more information about services and pricing, visit AcuityScheduling.com. About Acuity Scheduling