| Hey, at least we’re not promoting word clouds as an analysis tool… |
We talk about goals, a lot. Without having clear-cut goals, you never know if your business is truly performing to its full potential, and you cannot gauge progress. In the past, we’ve talked about how you should measure your goals. This time, we’re bringing in help to discuss measuring goals from an outside expert: Google.
Chances are, if you have a website, you’re running some form of analytics software on it. Google Analytics is free, and is continually improving. Currently, we would recommend using it over most paid alternatives, although it does require you to draw some of your own conclusions. The majority of the paid alternatives help you by interpreting the information, not by providing better information.
One of the great tools that Google Analytics has is the ability to set goals. When you have decided what you want your website to accomplish, you can set filters, and build funnels, to figure out what parts of your site are best suited to accomplish your goals. The fact that Google lets you set an imaginary dollar amount to the goal, so that you can use it to calculate the true ROI of your specific campaigns, is an excellent added benefit.
The ability to not only determine the number of people actively engaging with a portion of your site, but also to know how they got there, how long they stayed there, and at what point they bailed out of your sales process if they didn’t complete the process is priceless. If there was any way you could develop a tool that tracked people in your store the same way that Google Analytics tracks the average customer through your website, you would never lose a customer.
Some of the things that you can do is track out what the common keywords or key phrases that people are searching for that led them to your site. You can analyze which of these users become paying customers by putting assigning the correct goals, and you can further use SEO to streamline your business
And by the way, these analytics don’t stop on the desktop. There are analytic features that follow the mobile user, as well. Therefore, setting up some goals specifically for the mobile device is highly recommended. Using appropriate landing pages and funnelling the mobile user to complete the desired call to action is something that you should put a lot of energy into. Your mobile website needs to be a portal to completing a call to action, not simply a place to get information and go elsewhere.
If your idea of Google Analytics is simply a tool to see how many people come to your site a day, week, month, etc, then you aren’t using this extremely powerful tool correctly. Talk to your interactive marketing people today about how to use Goals and Google Analytics to increase sales and customer satisfaction. If you need additional help, we’re only a click away.
