Performance is important; so why aren’t you tracking it?
One billion websites*; that was the figure reported as the number of websites online in 2014, a number on the rise. GOOP Digital has more than 700 website clients Australia-wide, a number also on the rise.
1991 was the year the first ‘web page’ went live**. Since the 90s websites have provided a viable advertising and marketing medium for businesses. It’s safe to say websites have contributed to the downfall of traditional advertising – newspapers and the Yellow Pages (not happy Jan).
A significant point of difference when it comes to websites versus traditional advertising is this:
The success of a website can be measured.
At GOOP Digital, we add Google Analytics to our websites as standard practice. We have witnessed the benefits of this tracking tool time and again and continue to preach its importance.
It blows our mind that there are established businesses without websites, what equally blows our mind is this:
There are established businesses with websites not being tracked to measure performance!
You are (presumably) paying for your website to be hosted online; a marketing tool with the ability to track its success (or lack thereof), but you’re not. Why?
When you pay for an ad in a magazine or newspaper you can access circulation figures. Say 10,000 copies of the publication were distributed – great. But how many people saw your ad? Because:
- one business forgot to unpack its box of magazines and they ended up in recycling
- a group of readers skipped the page/section your ad was published in
- toddlers and dogs destroyed a few copies before they could be read
- a bunch of the savvy readers read the feature articles online
- another bunch of copies were used to clean BBQs.
So how many people saw your ad?
When you have a website with Google Analytics, you can track:
- the total number of users that visited your website (landing on any page)
- the pages these users landed on
- how many of the users are new, versus returning
- how long users interact with your website
- which devices users use to access your website
- which channels users have come from to reach your website
- where your website’s traffic is being referred from
- even demographics like gender and age.
You can also adjust the date range to view data trends and changes over time. Benefits of accessing Google Analytics data include:
- using the data to inform decisions about website design by reviewing which devices people use to access your site and its most popular features, i.e. if the majority of users access your site on a mobile device then your site needs a responsive design. If the booking form is a popular feature it should be prominent in the design.
- using the data to inform the basis of an online marketing strategy by reviewing popular pages and blog posts. You can take action to boost the visibility of other products and services if their pages are not performing as well as other pages/topics present on your site.
- using the data to improve usability. Are users falling short of the desired destination on your site? Perhaps your site’s structure or content doesn’t flow as well as it could, which means users give up. Ideally users should land on the desired destination page of your website, rather than go looking for it once they’re there.
- using the data to improve searchability. Is an area of your business lacking clients and momentum? How is the correlating page on your site performing? If users are not landing on that page perhaps it needs to be re-optimised or another strategy put into place to boost its ability to be searched and found.
These are just a few benefits of having Google Analytics added to your business website. We could go on!
Google Analytics data helps inform positive decisions to optimise business websites, while helping protect against ill-informed and poor decisions. There have been numerous cases when clients have asked us to remove a page because they think people don’t know to click on it or think it’s not working, only to find the page comes up highly in the list of landing pages shown in Google Analytics. Removing a page that’s performing would obviously have a negative impact on a website’s traffic. Without data, you simply can’t make the best decisions to improve the performance of your website.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure!
If you have a website without Google Analytics, talk to your web developer and ask why. Ask them to add it as a priority. If your web developer can’t or won’t add Google Analytics, you don’t like the data you’re seeing or you don’t understand it, simply contact us to make a time to talk about the performance of your website.
* Number of websites hits a BILLION: Tracker reveals a new site is registered every SECOND
** FLASHBACK: This Is What The First-Ever Website Looked Like