Analyse your use of Google Analytics

Want to boost your website’s revenue? Here’s a great first step. CHRIS THOMAS

By Chris Thomas

I’ve touched on analytics before, but I want to get into it in a little more detail because it’s a brilliant way that you can maximise the revenue your website makes for your business.

We know that Google Analytics is a great tool; it’s big on features, and really, really low on cost. That’s because it’s free. The only cost is the time it takes to setup an account and copy and paste the special Java script code into each page of your website.

Actually, when you think about what Google’s achieved with Google Analytics, it’s quite simply a stunning feat. I’d hate to even hazard a guess as to how many websites are using Google’s Analytics package, but there must be hundreds of thousands at least. 

Then when you consider the mind boggling amounts of data Google is collecting every second, and you put it together with an engine that processes it all for each customer, it’s hard to get your head around.

On Wednesday I attended a one day course on Google Analytics held by Panalysis and hosted by Zari Kotwal entitled “Increase the effectiveness of your website & advertising with Google Analytics”.

Panalysis is by far the market leader in the Australian analytics space and I’m happy to offer a plug and say the course was brilliant. Zari kept us engaged all day with lots of great case studies, practical advice and genuine enthusiasm.

There was a good spread of course participants, from state government, small to medium businesses and a local council. Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly, there were no large corporates.

I’ll try and condense a full day’s course into a couple of really important key points every website owner should be focusing on with their website.

Understand your business goals

What is the purpose of your website and how/where does it fit in with the rest of your business objectives?

Decide what it is you want to measure; set these as KPIs and keep them to a manageable number (say five to eight). Create realistic targets around your KPIs.

• Regularly compare results against your targets.
• Use the results to test and improve your website.
• Don’t let absolute numbers influence everything you do. Focus and respond to trends.

There were very practical lessons too; clear instructions on how to set up a goal conversion funnel, so you can visualise where customers are dropping out of your shopping cart and where they go. You can use that information to help keep folks in your cart and on their way to the final checkout.

For instance, you might find that at the “add your delivery details” stage of the shopping cart process, people are dropping out to visit your “shipping options and costs page”. By knowing this, you might include important shipping information on the, “delivery details” page itself to prevent the click away.

What I really enjoyed were the practical ideas for helping you meet your targets.

E-commerce examples included;

• Sending an email to customers who have saved carts but not checked out
• Adding security logos to increase trust and confidence.
• Bundling products to encourage higher spend.
• Daily competitor analysis.
• Add to Cart and product description buttons or links being more prominent.
• Increase your Google AdWords spend!

You can wring the most from your website when you really take the time to analyse how visitors interact with it.

Read more on Google analytics

Chris Thomas heads Reseo a search engine optimisation company which specialises in setting up and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns, Affiliate Programs and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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