One of the questions I usually ask when I sit down with a new client, or a current client with whom I haven’t touched on the subject is: How many visits does your website get per month? Most users answer that they don’t know or about x number.
Then I ask them if they know of any tool that measures traffic and some of them tell me that this information is available in the IT area or that since they are new in the position they have not had time to find out which tool they use.
The next step is usually to ask them if they know Google Analytics. Some say yes, others say no. When I ask them if they have it installed on their website they say no. The answer should be yes but they don’t know. The answer should be yes but they don’t know. Usually they have it installed because someone had the brilliant idea of doing it when they made their site. The other thing is that they have access. No. They don’t have it either.
So why the fuck do they have a website if they don’t know what’s going on with it? They care more about facebook likes or retweets on their Twitter profiles. But they don’t know what’s going on with their website, which is the foundation of any digital strategy.
Why? Because it is what they can control and they can move at will. They do not depend on the mood with which Mark Zuckerberg or one of his chief engineers woke up: “Remove this feature from Facebook, it is useless”. And it turns out that this feature was the one that was giving the best results in their communications plan.
Without indicators there is no strategy. Without measuring something we will not know if it needs to be improved.
Does Google Analytics cost?
No. Of course, if your website has a very high volume of traffic you will have to use the Premium version, which at the time of writing this post cost $150,000.
So, for a cost of zero dollars or pesos, as it is easier for you to interpret the subject you will have a detailed report of the behavior of the people who visit your website.
This information is invaluable because it will allow us to make decisions to improve not only the experience of our current and potential customers, but also to know what content and information is of most interest to them. This saves time for them and for us.
What kind of information does Google Analytics deliver?
Google Analytics has a large number of indicators and data that can be interpreted in many ways, depending on the type of business we have. Among others, the most used are:
- Sessions or visits.
- Time spent by users on the website.
- Number of pages viewed.
- From which country they visit us.
- From what type of device they access the site: computer, cell phone or tablet.
- Which are the most visited pages on our website.
- From where our visitors arrive: Search engines, other sites, social networks, email.
- What is the trend in terms of gender and age of our visitors.
Among many others.
Another very interesting feature of this tool is the possibility of measuring the business objectives of our site. So, if I want to know how many users filled out a form, watched a video or downloaded a file, this option is easily configurable with each of the steps that a user could take before reaching the final step.
For example, if we had 100 visits to the quotation form of a car website and the quotation has several steps to get to the end, we can measure how many of the users finished the quotation leaving their contact information, or how many abandoned the process at the time of selecting step 3, which is the financing possibilities. If only 5 of those users finish the quote we will have a 5% rate. We may need to make adjustments to the quote process to improve the quote completion rate and thus have a better chance of contacting more customers.
This is just one of the examples that show that web analytics is not just a cold report on the manager’s desk. It takes time and effort to make the company’s digital strategy successful in the long run.
For more information on how to take advantage of analytics contact us.
