Benefits of Google Analytics for a Small Business

What does Google Analytics (GA4) do?

Google Analytics records each time a user visits your website and what they do while they are there. It breaks down information including referrals, browsers, operating systems, pages viewed per session etc.

What are 10 things you can do with Google analytics?

1. Discover how many people visit your site.

2. Identify where your traffic is coming from.

3. Find out which sources bring the most and least business.

4. Analyse monthly traffic to see how it changes over time.

5. See what types of products or services web users are looking at on your site.

6. Find out where your customers live and other identifiers such as age, income and status.

7. See which keywords your customers use to find you.

8. See how long people stay on your site and where they go when they leave.

9. Identify what browsers and operating systems your customers use to visit you.

10. See the results of marketing activity so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Benefits of Google Analytics GA4.

The benefits of using Google Analytics GA4 are clear for small businesses who want to learn more about how their website is being used and use that information to grow their business.

Of course, you can grow your business without analytics. You can work harder, see more people, sell more products. If you want to work smarter, not harder, then you use the data to plan your growth more efficiently.

Google Analytics gives you a fair bit of information on its own. Combined with Search Console, which is also free, you have a powerful tool that can be the equivalent of using a crystal ball.

How does Google Analytics GA4 work?

Google Analytics works by the use of a small snippet of code that is placed on every page of your website. Every time someone visits, that code sends a hit to analytics. That piece of code can be put directly into your website or via Google Tag Manager. Google tag manager is also a snippet of code but in this case, it is a container for several pieces of code.

2. Identify where your traffic is coming from.

Every source of traffic to your site is important. It’s a great idea to have a mixture of organic and paid traffic, as well as a mix of sources such as email marketing and social media promotion.

Once you know where your visitors are coming from you can prioritise them accordingly. If one source is significantly low, it may be an opportunity to improve it. If another source is particularly high, you can focus on this area to maximise your return on investment (ROI). If you are not using paid advertising, yet, you can start being effective at a faster rate when you have data than when you start blind.

4. Analyse monthly traffic to see how it changes over time.

This is a great way to see if you can improve your site even further by looking at how things change month on month. For example, in the screenshot above it is clear that traffic fluctuates each month which means this business needs to have multiple ways of getting new customers in order to keep sales consistent throughout the year. You may see natural fluctuations that are typical in your industry but often these ups and downs are a sign of ‘feast and famine’ marketing. By that I mean, traffic goes up and you are busy and when that busy period drops, you start marketing again to increase enquiries. A sustainable business that you can trust requires consistent numbers.

6. Find out where your customers live and other identifiers such as age, income and status.

After you set up your Google Tag Manager code on the website, you will start gathering information about where your customers live. You can see whether they are in a certain city, state or country

You will also be able to get a feel for what age group and demographic they fit into, their income level and social status. This becomes more important once you start using paid marketing tactics so that you can target or exclude certain audience segments.

7. See which keywords your customers use to find you.

Whether paid or organic, your visitors are using keywords to find you. It is useful to know which keywords result in a click to your site and perhaps, more importantly, you can identify which keywords are not finding your website so that you can optimise for them.

When you see which keywords are being used to find your business, you can also begin to look at the competition. How many other advertisers are optimising or bidding on that same keyword? You can adjust your bids or content so that you rank higher than them and therefore get a larger share of traffic from these keywords.

8. See how long people stay on your pages and where they go when they leave.

The length of time that visitors stay on a page is a good indication of how interested they are. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Someone may open a page, see the information they need, such as a phone number, and then leave. In general, if a bounce rate is high with low page time duration, you can assume that your content is not holding them. By looking at where people land and leave your site, you can see what sections are not engaging visitors. Balance this with other data though as sometimes, searchers are looking for quick info such as opening times, phone number or address. They may take the information and leave. That’s still a good result but difficult to measure unless they click a call now button or you have a call tracking number.

You can also use Google Analytics to see how far people scroll down on your page. If the top of the page is getting a lot of attention but people aren’t scrolling down much further, you know that they have found what they are looking for.

9. Identify what browsers and devices your customers use to visit you.

Knowing which browsers and devices your visitors use is important for a number of reasons:

You can ensure that your website is compatible with the most popular browsers and devices. Have you looked at your website on a variety of devices and browsers? You may be shocked to find your website does not appear as you thought.

The first benefit is that you can make sure that your sites function properly under different conditions. Secondly, if you start paying for ads, you will be able to adjust your bids based on the quality of traffic from different devices.

10. See the results of marketing activity so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Unless you can measure your marketing, you will never know whether you are wasting money or not. When you sell online, it’s easy to to measure as a conversion equals a sale. When your goal is more website visitors it’s harder to know whether they convert to a sale. An impression of how busy you are is usually used to judge. With Google Analytics, although you may not be able to see the final result of a visit, you can measure how engaged people are so that you know where money is best spent. With clever use of events in Tag Manager, you can track the different stages in the customer journey so that you can at least make judgements relative to different, keywords, events and demographic markers so that you direct your budget to where it works.

In summary, Google Analytics is a free website analysis tool that can tell you many aspects of how your website is doing. It doesn’t matter if your product or service is a physical one or a digital one, Google Analytics can still provide insights with regards to marketing and advertising. Make it a priority to add it to your website so that it can start collecting data ready for when you need it.