Is Google Analytics your best friend or worst enemy?

In this post, i’m going to talk about why Google Analytics could be your best friend, but also your worst enemy. 

Now I love Google Analytics. What an amazing tool. You don’t need to pay for it and it tells you so much about what’s going on, on your website. However, it could be your best friend like i’ve just described it, or it could be your worst nightmare, your worst enemy.

So what makes the difference? You see, one of the beauties of google analytics is the wealth of information that you can get from the package. You just load on your website and it’s gonna tell you everything you need to know. But that’s also the downside. You, can, get swamped in data and never take action.

So in this post, I want to help you make sure that Google Analytics remains your best friend and doesn’t turn into your worst enemy. So the key to making sure Google Analytics remains your best friend, is being really clear about the information you want to gather from your Google Analytics, and you could do that before you even open the package.

Most people go into Google Analytics to see what they can see and start building their kpi’s up based upon what Google Analytics can tell them. It’s the wrong way to go around it.

Think about your business first and use Google Analytics to help your business. Not the other way around. So first thing off, I talk about your website needing to improve its conversion rate.

Well, let’s have conversions then is our number one thing we want to look at. But of course our social media and our search engine optimisation, our email marketing budgets, we don’t know how much money to put on each one. Is one working, not working all of this stuff.

Well, then we can look at the conversion right by different particular mediums, so we can look at whether those conversions typically come from our email marketing campaign or from our social media campaigns, so we can break it down.

We can have a look at the landing pages; where do people most often land, and is that affecting the conversion rate? So, should we be sending our ads or our social media links to a different page that has a better conversion rate for example.

But what you can see is we’re starting with something really specific. I’m interested in my conversion rate. So all this other stuff just becomes less important.

What we could do is say, ‘how does the time on site affect conversion rate’? That’s becomes a secondary number. You might find that people who spend more time on site convert more, so that starts to tell us how we can get people to spend more time on the website because we’ll get more conversions from them.

Remember, it’s all centred back to something specific you want, rather than just looking blindly at the data and saying that looks really interesting. Of course, the data looks interesting, but that’s How Google Analytics becomes your worst enemy, whereas if you’re very specific on what you want and you go looking specifically and not distracted for what you want, Google Analytics remains your best friend.

If you would like me to look at your Google Analytics with you and setup correct tracking of the things that are key to your business, use the form below to get in touch.