In the past month, I’ve come across two different prospective clients who do not have Google Analytics set up properly on their websites. What does that mean? It means that their website is not collecting data that can be analyzed and used to make it better.
There’s no good reason not to be measuring what’s happening on your website. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of good reasons why you should use Google Analytics (hats off to this blog post by Dinesh Thakur, of Medium):
- It’s free
- It collects data on your website automatically
- You can see if website Visitors are staying a while or leaving quickly
- You can compare how your website is doing now vs. sometime in the past – so, for example, you can see if traffic is seasonal
- You capture other information about the traffic to your website, including geographic location, demographics, devices used, etc.
In fact, not having Google Analytics is equivalent to:
- Not knowing where people are coming from to get to your website
- Not counting the number of people coming to your website
- Not knowing if your business is (potentially) in trouble
- Not knowing what marketing dollars are being well spent vs. wasted
I emphasize the last one because I run into businesses all the time that are frustrated with their marketing – because they have no idea if it’s working for them. Do you have this issue? Setting up your Google Analytics is the first way to help.
If you do have Google Analytics, are you looking at them? There’s an old saying, what gets measured gets attention – and this is certainly true of website analytics. If you’re not watching these every week, you don’t know how your business is doing when it comes to visibility to the outside world.
So here’s a test: can you answer all of these questions?
- Do know your website traffic from last week? Or the past month?
- Are you looking at this on a regular basis?
- Do you have a plan in place to make your website better?
If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, it’s time you take charge of your website! If you don’t know how to do this, feel free to contact me and I’ll get you started.
