All business owners want to know how well their website is working. They want to ascertain who is visiting, where they come from and what content is working for them. These statistics help them establish whether their website is successful – as well as what they need to do more or less of.
The good news is there is actually a simple plugin in you can install on your WordPress website that gives you all of this information – and it’s called Google Analytics!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free plugin launched by Google in 2005. Designed to give you key insights into your website behaviour, it tracks your website traffic and creates reports for you to access 24/7. It can also be installed on multiple websites, giving you easy access to these reports via its easy to read dashboard.
Essential visitor information
All small businesses have a profile for their ideal customer. This includes information on their age and gender, where they hang out online and what other places they visit. Google Analytics gives you the opportunity to glean more information on your ideal customer, including:
- Which websites referred them to your site (where else they’re hanging around)
- What they’re interested in on your site – along with their subsequent actions
- Demographics, such as age and gender, location, interests and language
- Whether it’s their first visit or if they’re a returning visitor
- How long they stayed on your site
This means you can tailor your website to appeal to your ideal customer AND find out potential sites for future joint ventures.
How well your website is doing
Google Analytics reports also highlight how effective your website is, by showing you what is and isn’t working. You will establish
- Which blog posts and pages have the most visits – as well as those that have low or no visits
- What keywords visitors used to find your site and your content
- How well your sales and opt-in pages are converting (if you set up ‘goals’ within Google Analytics to track this)
This ensures you tweak your content to make it more effective for your ideal end results AND so you can do more of what works well for your visitors.
How to install Google Analytics
With all of this detailed information easily available to you, you’ll want to ensure you have Google Analytics set up on all of your sites. Luckily, it’s really easy to install on your WordPress sites.
If you haven’t yet installed Google Analytics, you can easily get started by simply:
- Visit their website at http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics/
- Sign into your Google Account (or sign up)
- Choose ‘website’ tab (have the option of ‘mobile’ tab here too)
- Enter your website details (name and URL)
- Click ‘get tracking ID’
- Go to WordPress site and, to install the code, you have 3 options:
- Go to your themes ‘header.php’ coding page and insert the code after the <body> tag OR
- Install ‘Insert Header & Footer’ plugin and, once activated, paste in the code
- Alternatively, you website theme may already have a section to paste in the Google Analytics code – so check this out first!
What do you consider the best features of Google Analytics? Did you find it really easy to install and use? Are there elements of Google Analytics that you struggle with? Why not share your thoughts and opinions in the comments box below!
Image courtesy of dizain/Dollar Photo Club