I have asked many a business person over the years — do you have Google Analytics on your site? Time and time again, people say, “Yes, I think so, but I never look at it.”

Most website developers will install the Google Analytics Tracking code on your site so that you can count important metrics.  However, the owners of those sites seem to think all this information is terribly boring, and difficult to understand. But it’s not.  Imagine if you could:

1. Know how many people are visiting your site.   You should know if your traffic is growing or shrinking.   If it’s shrinking, you need to work harder versus your competition, or risk losing market share.
2. Know what times of day and days of the week people visit most often.  If you see when people most often visit your site, you’ll know when they are most ready to receive sales calls, and email blasts.  Timing your efforts will greatly improve response rates.
3. Know how long they stay on which pages of your site.  Are people seeking out one particular product or service?  Maybe that one deserves to get more promotion.
4. Know which page they visit first.  The first page, also known as the “landing page”, tells a lot about what your visitors were looking for.  The first page should really grab their attention and be relevant to what they searched for to prevent them from “bouncing” off your website and going to a competitor’s site.
5. Know which page they visit last, just before they leave your site.  If it’s note the “contact us” page, or a page with a phone number on it, you may have a problem.  Make sure any pricing page leads them to want to contact you.
6. Know how they found your site.  Did they find you through searching your name, through coming to another site?  This is really the key to boosting the external sources that can drive more traffic to you. In the diagram above, you can see this client gets some traffic (39%) and some from Pay Per Click Ads (28%), as well as referral traffic from bbb.org, the Better Business Bureau website  You might be surprised to see that social media drives real customers to your site, and that what you post on your social sites is indeed making  a difference.  This will help you when deciding how to budget next year’s marketing efforts. In the second pie chart, we see the client is getting far more referrals from Google+ than from Twitter, Facebook, or Yelp.
7. Know what keywords they used to find you.  Was if you specifically they sought?  Or a product you sell?  Or, something related to what you sell but don’t sell already?   Talk about harnessing new opportunities for services! Knowing what prospective customers are looking for is like gold to your business.

These quick bits of knowledge sound great – but as mentioned in previous posts, it’s not the easiest to find them within Google Analytics.  This is why our team at Tenato builds our clients custom Google Dashboards — so all the information you need is right at your fingertips.  For more about these dashboards, CLICK HERE.