A Small Business Guide to Setting Up Google Analytics

In today’s digital world, we have access to more data and information than ever before. Google Analytics is a tool with which small business owners can not only access this data, but can also pull meaningful insights from it to improve their bottom lines.  

In this beginner’s guide to Google Analytics, we will explain everything that you need to know about Google Analytics, why it’s important for your Website, and how to get started using it.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the most popular Web analytics services, used by thousands of companies of all sizes across the world. It is the most comprehensive free analytics tool and allows you to measure your advertising results as well as your Website activity, all applications, and your social media performance. According to Christopher Smith, president of AGI, “Google Analytics provides unparalleled insights into how a Website or app is performing, and if they are meeting the objectives of the business.”

Why Should Small Businesses Use Google Analytics?

A few benefits of Google Analytics include:

1. It is free and available to business Websites of all sizes.
2. Its reports are beginner-friendly and easy to understand.
3. It provides a comprehensive look into your Website’s audience, giving you all of the data you need to improve your Websites user experience and boost your revenue.

Through the tool, you can learn a lot more than whether or not you are getting traffic on your Website. You can also gain insights into the actual location of the users who visit your Website. You can learn where your users are coming to your Website, whether it’s via social media channels, other Websites, or through simply searching your business on Google. You can determine which content is the most popular on your Website, and learn how long users are spending on each page of your site. If you have eCommerce on your Website, you can analyze your customer’s shopping behavior and assess reports on sales.

In their Guide to Google Analytics, Moz outlines some valuable questions that Google Analytics can help you to answer:

1. How many users visit my Website?
2. Where are my visitors from?
3. Is it important for me to have a mobile-friendly Website?
4. What are the top sources that send traffic to my Website?
5. What marketing activities are the most valuable and drive the most traffic to my Website?
6. What content do my visitors like the most?
7. What are the ways that I can improve my site’s speed?
8. Which pages on my Website are top performing?
9. How many visitors have been converted to customers through my Website?
10. Where did these converting visitors come from and where did they go to on my Website?

How to Install Google Analytics on Your Small Business’s Website

There are a few different approaches that you can take to setup Google Analytics on your Website. You can setup the tool on your Website manually, which will require you to copy the tracking code from your analytics account and then add it to each page of your Website.

However, if you want an easier approach to setup Google Analytics, there are a variety of tools that you can install and activate on your Website. For instance, if you are using a WordPress site, you can install the MonsterInsights plugin, which is a top-rated plugin that helps you set up Google Analytics in just a few clicks. With this approach, you do not even have to touch your website code. MonsterInsights offers a great post that provides detailed information on how to properly setup Google Analytics in WordPress. If you have a Drupal Website, checkout Cloudways’ article on adding Google Analytics to Drupal 8.

Google Analytics is a cost-effective and easy way to gain actionable insights from your Website that can ultimately improve your bottom line. In our next few posts, we will take a closer look at how you can set up goals and analyze reports on Google Analytics.