How Google Analytics can benefit your local business
It’s more than likely that you are now trading in a more competitive market than you were some ten or so years ago. With the rise of social media and smart phone technology, you’re probably not only competing with many other local but national or possibly international businesses.
So, when it comes to generating more leads for your business online, the first necessary step is to get a clear picture of how your website is performing — and Google Analytics is the ideal place to start.
An accurate Google Analytics configuration will help to you to better understand:
- Who’s coming to your website (age, gender, demographics)
- Where they’re coming from (geographic location or area)
- How they found you (Google search, paid ads, links)
- What they’re interested in (top pages, top session durations)
- What they don’t like about your site (bounce rates, short durations)
- Which marketing efforts help the sales process (assisted conversions).
With this information available at your fingertips, you will be better equipped to plan and execute informed and successful marketing and sales strategies that will improve your website and engage your audiences to convert more of your website visitors into leads.
Setting up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes, and is particularly important for local businesses that are potentially competing in a market much broader than their local area.
While it can collate and provide you with extremely useful and simple data that can be translated into high performing strategies, configuring Google Analytics for local businesses can be complex – and if it isn’t done correctly can be detrimental to the performance of your website.
Here’s some of our top tips for configuring Google Analytics for local business to ensure that it works for you and provides you with valuable information.
Install your website tracking code on your website
Google Analytics will create a unique tracking code for your website which will need to be installed on every page in what’s called your ‘website header’. Your website tracking code will gather information from your website and securely feed that data into your Google Analytics account. This can be a little complicated to install but you can reach out to a digital marketing agency in Adelaide if you need help with this.
Set up goals
While you likely know the key performance indicators for your website and business, Google Analytics doesn’t. You need to tell Google what success looks like for your website and how it should be measured. In Google Analytics, this is called setting up goals and it is done through the Google Analytics dashboard.
To set up goals, navigate Admin > View > Goals > New Goal
There are a variety of goal types you can set up and it depends entirely on your business and what success looks like for you. Destination and event goals are generally the most popular but there are others to choose from.
Destination based goals
One of the most popular types of goals are destination based goals — for example, a thank you page. This may look like a website visitor completing a form and then being directed to a thank you page. Each time a visitor completes a form and is directed to your thank you page it is counted as a goal.
Event based goals
These can be a little more complex to configure but possible, nonetheless. As the name would suggest, these are goals that relate to a specific event. For example, an event based goal could be the click of a specific button, such as one clicked after filling out a form. One thing to look out for with event based goals is to make sure the correct validation has been configured. For example, if someone starts to fill out a form but doesn’t complete it, when they click the button it still may be tracked as a goal.
Exclude bots and spiders
Research has found that almost 25% of all traffic is bot traffic. To counter this and produce more accurate information, Google created a tool within Google Analytics which filters this traffic out of your results.
Navigate to Admin > View > View Settings to the box that says Bot Filtering. This will pull it from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and ensure that your traffic is filtered against the list of known spiders and bots.
Filter spam and personal traffic
In addition to filtering out traffic from bots, you should also filter out spam and personal (your own) traffic to ensure that you’re only working with accurate data when making future online marketing and SEO decisions. While there will always be some margin of error, any steps you can take to minimise is should be pursued.
Navigate to Admin > View > View Filters > Add Filters.
The aim of this is to filter out your own IP address and that of anyone else in your business. Simply, search ‘What’s my IP’ in Google and you can find your IP address, and then from there add it in to your Google Analytics as an exclusion.
Connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console
Like Google Analytics, Google Search Console is another wealth of information when it comes to website performance and visitor data. Google Search Console can provide you with valuable data regarding organic search, search queries, specific pages and how they’re performing, their average position or ranking, and plenty of other information. Connecting this to your Google Analytics and making sure they work efficiently together will only enhance the quality of the data that you can access.
Once you have set up your Google Search Console, navigate to Admin > Property > Property Settings > Search Console.
Use UTM tracking codes
In simple terms, UTM (or Urchin Tracking Module) codes are snippets of code — attached to the end of a specific page URL — that are used to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. They are also used to pinpoint specific sources of traffic to your website.
There are five variants of URL parameters that you can track through UTM codes — source, medium, campaign, term and content.
UTM codes are a powerful way to track the effectiveness of specific campaigns. They can tell you information such as where website visitors came from and what specific sources, mediums or campaigns were effective in directing them to your website.
UTM tracking codes can be added to paid ad campaigns, Google My Business profile, blogs, emails, QR codes and the list goes on. As a smaller local business you might find it a better use of your time to focus your efforts on specific campaigns to measure their effectiveness.
Also Read: 10 effective digital marketing strategies to try in 2021
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