Why You Need Google Analytics for Your Small Business
CEO of business analytics tool Mixpanel said:
"Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.”
With half of all small businesses failing within their first 4 years, many pay the price for making ill-informed, non-data based decisions. Your business' data is now more readily available than ever as we move further into a digital marketing focused world. Take advantage of the tools available to you, understand your data and act on it to make sure you're getting exactly what you want from your digital marketing efforts.
Google Analytics is a great place to start. Why?
- It's free! As a small business, you know every penny counts and you may be reluctant to expand your budget to add another tool. Google Analytics operate a "freemium" service meaning there are both free and paid tiers. However, most small to medium businesses get more than enough data using the free version.
- You can track where traffic is coming from. Google Analytics lets you know exactly where people are finding you. You may see lots of traffic from social media, or it might be from organic search results. Understanding where your visitors are coming from will help you make changes to your campaigns to bring in more traffic from a specific source or even explore new sources altogether.
- You will get more info on your demographics. When you know who exactly is viewing your website, you will know whether or not your digital marketing efforts are reaching the right people, and you will know what type of content to create to resonate with your audience. It's important to know who you're targeting, and if you're reaching them at all, so ensure you don't waste valuable time and budget on marketing to the wrong audience.
- You can find out what are your most profitable channels. You can compare conversion rates from a paid Google Ad, referring sites and more. Understanding which sites and pages are offering the best conversion rates allows you to direct more budget and time into optimising these channels or pages.
The health of your small business is your number one priority. Integrating with Google Analytics is a high impact, low effort option to ensure your small business is healthy, thriving and always improving.
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Rebecca McGrath
The quote of making decisions based on gut instincts and being lucky really summarizes the points that you were making about why to use Google Analytics is so beneficial to small businesses. Most tools that give that level of in-depth knowledge you would expect to be out of the budget reach of a small business. It definitely offers enough at the free level to be integrated into all small businesses. Knowing where your traffic is coming from is absolutely essential and any small business will find their marketing budget stretches further the more they follow this. This is a great synopsis of the benefits of Google Analytics.
ReplyDeleteI think the main message in all our blogs is trust facts over fiction and as we have understood by now - facts can be easily accessed through Google Analytics but understanding them is a whole other ball game. Once you understand them then you can utilize them correctly and get full benefits from the tool. Once you understand where you are profiting most you can again make full use of Google Analytics and link in Google Adsense (but that is a whole other story). I feel like you included the four main points of Google Analytics that small business need to remember - the rest of the bells and whistles are a nice add on to have on the tool too.
ReplyDeleteI really like the quote at the beginning of this post, many of us do trust our gut above all else, but we can not ignore the vast amount of information that has been made available to us in this digital age. Businesses need to know where their customers are and how they can reach them. Google Analytic is an invaluable tool and will help small businesses thrive and become competitive in today's market.
ReplyDeleteGood to know it can help businesses compare conversion rates. Small businesses don't have endless amounts of money to pump into paid for ads so knowing exactly what channels work best will help them better focus their resources. I guess what's clear is that Google Analytics can help a business constantly adapt and improve in response to how their customers/visitors are interacting with their site.
ReplyDeleteComparing conversion rates is important to find out what works best and where the business can improve while saving time. Shocking stat that half of new small businesses fail within their first 4 years, it would be interesting to know if the businesses that fail had Google Analytics set up or not. I like how you clearly labelled the benefits in bold, making the article easy to read.
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