Article Provided Herb Kimble.
Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool, mainly because it is free and a Google product. In 2005 Google bought out another analytics platform called Urchin, renamed it to Google Analytics and made it free. At that time no one expected this and it was a huge welcome news. It pretty much ended the business of any competing analytics platforms that were charging fees anywhere from $10 a month and up.
Every commercial website should have Google Analytics installed to track their traffic and referral sources. Below I will go into detail on why you should use Google Analytics.
- Track Website Traffic
You can simply see how much traffic your website is getting and from which sources, which helps measure your marketing efforts. You can compare your traffic to previous months or years and also figure out seasonal trends. - Track Social Media Traffic
You can track referring traffic and know which sources are sending you the most traffic, such as social media sites. If you are doing social media marketing, this would be one way to measure the success of which social media channels work best and spend more efforts on what works. - Track Traffic from Ads & Email Campaigns
If you are doing any advertising such as banner advertising on different websites, you can also see how much traffic each site is sending you and measure the success of your advertising. You can even how many times your banners are viewed by use of tracking codes and pixels and see the results in your analytics. Even you can track your email marketing efforts in Google Analytics. - Track Your SEO Results
You can see the amount of traffic coming from each search engine and even see some of the keywords that Google sends to you. Years ago Google actually showed every keyword traffic, however they at present a portion of the actual traffic is shown and if you want to see more, you should also enroll in Google Search Console (Formerly known as Webmaster Tools). These stats will help you with your SEO efforts. - Track Your Google Adwords
If you do Google Adwords advertising, you can link your account to your Adwords and get traffic and conversion stats on your Google Analytics. If you sell products online you can easily see stats on how much sales you had on daily or monthly basis and even see the amount of clicks on each keyword you bid on. If you do not sell a product or service online, you should at minimum track the number of leads you get from your website from your contact form. You can even assign a dollar value to your leads and measure the success of your ads that way.
About the Author: This articles provided by Herb Kimble. Herb Kimble is an expert in Sales & marketing and ran a large Call Center in Philippines for many years. He currently runs a film production company called CineFocus Production and a Steaming Network called Urban Flix.