MSBDC workshop demystifies Google Analytics
April 30, 2016 filed under: Digital Marketing, News, Website Optimization
I’d like to extend a big thank you to MSBDC for the opportunity to give another talk on Google Analytics to their membership last week. This is the second year in a row that I’ve done this and I enjoyed it greatly.
Here are some of the big picture points that we covered in the training:
All websites can be improved – even the hippest new site with the most cutting edge design has room for improvement. Google Analytics data can tell us a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of any website and paying attention to where the data is pointing will help you focus on making improvements that will yield results.
Focus only on the Analytics reports that are relevant to your website – the first time you log into Analytics, you’ll likely be presented with a dizzying array of different reports. Rather than trying to understand them all, I suggest focusing only on those that are most relevant to your website goals and using the information that you glean from them to define actionable items for your website. Analytics data that doesn’t result in actions isn't so helpful.
Set up goals in Analytics to help you more easily track your website successes and failures – this is something that I recommend to pretty much all of my clients. The Goals feature of Analytics makes it easy to accurately track how well you're doing against your established goals. In order to use this feature well, you'll want to make sure that your goals are defined cleary and that they're actionable.
Review your Analytics data regularly – we all have too much to do and adding one more task to your already overfull plate may seem daunting. Trust me though, reviewing your Analytics data regularly will go a long way toward keeping your website on track. Otherwise, Analytics can become just another tool in your toolbox.
Supporting the work of small businesses is a passion of mind and the discussions that came out of the MSBDC workshop were very interesting and engaging, based on the participants’ good questions and the real life business examples that they brought to the workshop. I look forward to continuing this work going forward!