Google Analytics Tips – Our Top 10

Our top 10 tips for Google Analytics are designed to help save you time and make sure you use this invaluable application for improving your website.

• Get your web designer to add the coding

Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics account you’ll need to add the analytics coding supplied to your website.

It’s essential that this is done correctly so that your analytics account picks up all the necessary data. If you don’t have access to your website or you’d rather not interfere with the HTML coding, it’s best to get your web designer to add your analytics coding for you.

• Act on the information you discover

If you use Google Analytics and discover something that needs to be changed on your website then you need to take action as soon as possible. This may sound like an obvious tip but many people look at the data, know something’s not quite right and then choose to do nothing about it.

• Don’t rely on guess work

Don’t assume that a poor bounce rate (the % of people who arrive on one of your web pages and then leave without visiting any of the others) is down to one single factor such as a poor headline.

Your headline may be fine but it could be your page loading speed that’s the problem or lack of internal links between pages. You can try changing each element in turn and then monitor your results over a period of time.

• Don’t try to change everything at once

Following on from tip #3 you shouldn’t change too many elements of your website at once if you’re not happy with the analytics data you’re seeing.

Adopting an ‘all or nothing’ approach will only lead you round in circles and it could be that by just changing one word in your main headline you could see a decrease in your bounce rate and an increase in online conversions.

• Create custom reports

With so much data available via Google Analytics it can be a full time job to analyse and monitor all the data so it’s wise to just pick out the parts that you feel are more important and create your own custom reports.

• Monitor your changes

Once you’ve made changes to your website, SEO strategy or Pay per Click campaign it’s important to follow them up by closely monitoring your analytics data so you can tell if you’ve made the improvements you set out to.

• Track your conversions

You can also use Google Analytics to track your online conversions; this could be a sale, enquiry or download that’s done via your website. You will need to add a conversion tracking code to your website in order to collect the data for this.

• Integrate your Pay per Click campaigns

It’s a good idea to integrate any Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns you’re running into your Google Analytics account. Your overall PPC strategy can be tweaked and improved on by closely monitoring the data within your analytics account. You will also be able to compare traffic levels for your site to see the difference between natural SEO and PPC.

• Use Google Analytics regularly

As a small business you can’t afford to bury your head in the sand. Using Google Analytics regularly can help you take advantage of search trends, keep up to speed with your competitors as well as getting up to date figures on how your site is performing as a whole.

• Don’t let it take over

It’s very easy to get caught up in all the statistics in Google Analytics and spend most of your time analysing everything to the nth degree. While certain elements are very important and may need to be addressed, you shouldn’t get too bogged down in every little detail to the extent that it starts to impact on your business.

Google Analytics can become counter-productive if you’re sitting for hours analysing why your site isn’t getting more traffic when you could be doing something proactive to get more visitors.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.