As I tell all of my clients, building a website is only a milestone in your business journey. Also, websites are not a “build it and they will come” type of investment. Without proper marketing, a website will not receive much traffic. The Urban Geeks do not usually handle any marketing activities; however, we know it is important to be able to measure traffic. To measure site traffic, we leverage Google Analytics for a few reasons.

Ease of Installation

Installing Google Analytics is probably one of the easiest tasks I have when it comes to completing a website. I just simply sign into the Google Analytics dashboard and create a new site. Once all the information is completed, I’m provided with some JavaScript code to insert into every page on the website. With WordPress, I don’t have to paste the code onto every page; I simply open the Branda Plugin from WPMU Dev and place it in the header configuration. Once configured in WordPress, I can then see page visits being tracked in Google Analytics.

Information Tracked

I’m not going to lie; Google Analytics tracks a lot of information. Some of it is too advanced for even me. That’s why there is a market for specialists that have been trained in Google Analytics. These specialists can help you setup many different things such as dashboards with the most relevant information to tracking the amount of money each page generates for your ecommerce store.

For me, I tend to stick with the following basic information:

• Users (unique visitors to a website)
• Sessions (number of different visits to the website from the above users)
• Bounce Rate (number of visitors that visit a website that navigate away from the website after viewing only one page)
• Session Duration (how long those sessions last)
• Acquisition Overview (metrics on where and how people are discovering your website – ex. Google Searches, Twitter)
• Behavior/Landing Page (the first page that a user views when they visit a website)

There are tons of other analytics that are tracked so you can dive as deep into it as you want.

Shared Access

The last piece that makes Google Analytics a winner is the granular access control. I’m easily able to grant viewing-only privileges to my clients that just want to see the data. For other clients, I can give them administrator access to create their own dashboards. As with most Google products, the user interface is familiar to most people.

Overall, Google Analytics has and will continue to be on our list of Go-Live tasks to ensure our clients have access to the data they need to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. For clients that may be weary of Google and its access to their data, we can also set up Matoma on a separate private server to ensure 100% data ownership. Either way, website analytics play a crucial role in deciding not only what to do next with website updates but also what to do next with a business. We’re here to ensure you get the right data to make the right decisions.

Google Analytics | Services We Use Series