Would you ever hire a sales rep and not keep track of his/her calls, appointments, proposals, and sales? Of course not! So, why is it when I ask business owners basic questions about their website--how many visits it gets per month, the visit-to-lead conversion rate, etc.--they have no clue what the answers are?
I'll tell you why. It's because most business owners treat their website like an online brochure, and in doing so, they're making a huge mistake! Instead of comparing your website to an inanimate object, think of your website as if it were a virtual sales rep--complete with a built in sales funnel.
When you think of things this way, you'll tend to start asking better questions:
- How many visits does my website get per month?
- What percentage of these visitors are even in my service area?
- How well is my website doing at converting these visitors into leads?
- Are the leads any good?
- How much revenue comes from my web leads?
- Which traffic sources deliver the best results?
There's only one problem. How are you going to track all this stuff? Answer: Google Analytics! Google Analytics (GA) is free and incredibly powerful--if you know what to do with it. In this blog post, I'm going to tell you three things you can do with Google Analytics that you probably didn't know you could do.
1. Track Your Organic Search Rankings
Did you know that you can track your organic search rankings in Google Analytics? You can! To do it, you simply have to setup a few custom filters within on of your Google Analytics profiles. Think of each profile in your GA account as a set of sunglasses with a different colored lense. By changing to a different profile, you get a different perspective on your website--depending on the customizations of that profile.
For example, you can setup one profile that only shows you the organic search traffic coming to your website and your organic search rankings. Suppose you're a remodeling company investing in SEO. You might use this profile to evaluate your results.
2. Get Blog Post Ideas
Some business owners know that they can use GA to see the search terms people are using to find their website. What many do not know is that they can use Google Analytics to get great ideas for future blog posts.
How do you do this? You could go to the keywords section of GA and comb through all the keywords people are currently using to find you, but this can be very time consuming. A better way is to create an advanced segment that shows only the searchers that used a keyword phrase in the form of a question. Once you see these, you can turn each question into a blog post!
3. Track Outgoing Links to Social Media Sites
I believe that most small business owners would be far better served using social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube to bring qualified visitors TO their website. The reason I point this out is because someone started an idiotic trend of placing the icons of the major social media websites right next to the contact information on each page of your website.
Why any business owner would want to encourage people to leave their website to play around on Facebook is beyond me, but I digress. If you're going to link people away from your website, wouldn't you at least what to track how often it happens and whether those clicks to your FB page really do come back or turn into sales? I would.
With Google Analytics you can track outgoing links by creating what's known as an "on click" goal. When you create an onclick goal, GA will register a phantom Page View in your account. You can name this something like, "outbound-clicks-to-our-fb-page." When things are properly set up, every time someone clicks your FB icon to leave your website, you'll see a view to the "outbound-clicks-to-our-fb-page." You can use the number of these page views to see how often visitors are taking this action.
So, in conclusion, it's a mistake to treat your website like the equivalent of a digital tri-fold brochure. Think of your website like a sales rep. Just like you'd never hire a sales rep and not give him/her goals, you shouldn't build a website without a specific purpose. Google Analytics is a great tool you can use to track and analyze the activity on your website. But, in order to get the most value out of GA, you have to customize it to your business.
The advanced features above are just the tip of the iceberg. For more information, check out the documentation on the Google Analytics site.
Comments