When you launch a website to grow your business or to promote your brand, you need a way to measure your website’s performance. You will for instance want to know if your potential customers are visiting your website on a regular basis, and you will also want to gather the information that can help you improve your chances of online success. In today’s article, I will share my insights on Google Analytics, which is currently the most popular tool used for measuring website metrics.
To use Google Analytics in your website, I recommend that you delegate the task to your experienced web developer so as to have it properly set up. In the event that Google Analytics is not set properly, it will most likely report inaccurately, which will in turn mislead you about your website’s performance. Once you properly set Google Analytics to gather your website’s metrics, you will be able to have a good idea on how your website is performing. The reason I have said you will have a good idea instead of saying you will have the actual results is because the free Google Analytics app does not give its users actual results – it gives sampled results.
The disadvantage that comes with sampled results is that you will not be able to know the exact number of users that visit your website on a regular basis, and to further complicate this situation, the free Google Analytics app does not disclose the actual figures. To get the actual results, you would have to upgrade to Google Analytics 360, which can be quite costly for most small-sized businesses. Nonetheless, it is better to have sampled results than no results at all and once you learn to interpret your sampled data accurately, then you will be able to get the most out of the free Google Analytics app.
The sampled data will give you a good idea of several key indicators such as how many people visit your website on a regular basis, which pages they visit, how long they stay on the pages they visit, the devices they use to visit your website, their geographical locations, the browsers they use to view your website, and the sources of traffic to your website et cetera. You can then use all this information to optimize your website and to also come up with strategies that can lead to the achievement of your sales and marketing goals.
While Google Analytics is designed to collect the data of every user that visits your website, it is important to note that the Firefox browser has a privacy policy that denies all tracking software the access to track Firefox users. This means that even when you upgrade to the paid Google Analytics package, you will still not be able to accurately track all the visitors to your website since Firefox is the second most popular browser after Google Chrome. All in all, until the industry provides a better alternative to Google Analytics, my conclusion is to make the most of what it offers by properly setting it up and learning to accurately interpret the sampled results.
Interested in getting an efficient website for your business or project? Please contact me on 0792 694 725 or email me at info@karenwebs.com and we will engage productively from there. Till the next article, be well.
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