Google Analytics is a tool that has proven incredibly useful to numerous websites and online stores thanks to its ability to let its users know more about the performance of their online platforms.
This includes insight into the success of their content, and their marketing, by taking a look at how users interact with their website and their content.
Google Analytics is also perfectly suited to those running online businesses and selling goods and services on their platform. But unless you know how to utilize it best, making the most of Google Analytics can be somewhat difficult.
What are some of the best ways to make the most of Google Analytics, and use its many tools to your advantage?
Want to use Google Analytics to make your online presence more effective? Then make sure to read on down below, because we have collected 6 of the very best tips that can help you to make the most of it!
1 – Ensure That Your Funnels Are Functioning
“What is a funnel?” I hear you ask. Don’t worry, it’s quite simple. The ‘funnel’ simply refers to the journey that your customers go through as they navigate your website and come to a decision on whether to purchase a product or service from you.
The customer journey can be visualized as a funnel, as the customer enters the top, and your aim is to ensure they find their way to the bottom of the funnel, which is the point at which they pay for the product or service that you are offering.
This will allow you to identify areas where your funnel is currently proving ineffective, so that you can then make the appropriate changes!
Google Analytics presents all of this visually, making it easy for you to understand your website’s effectiveness.
You want to ensure that not only are people finding your website, but that they are also enticed to choose one of your products or services.
Once they have chosen one of your items, the hard part is getting them to make the sale and part with their hard earned cash.
Thus, in order for an online business to succeed, the funnel needs to be efficient and effective. But how can you ensure this? The basic thing you need to focus on is ensuring that the user experience of your website is strong.
Ensure that your potential customers are never confused or daunted by your website, as this will help to keep them from leaving your site.
You also want to avoid creating hurdles that can prevent people from completing their purchases.
Where you can, try to offer free or affordable shipping, and try to minimize the number of screens that lie between the customer making their choice and then confirming their purchase.
This helps to ease hesitation, which lowers the likelihood of potential customers clicking away at the last minute.
2 – Find Your Top Referral Sites
Website referrals are one of the most powerful and effective ways to generate traffic towards your website or online store.
These take the form of direct links to your website on other online sites, guest posts on high profile blogs, or simply being name-dropped by another trusted website.
When using the Google Analytics platform, you will be able to take a direct look at which sites have been directing traffic in your direction, and which ones are proving the most effective.
This is great for helping you to identify your top referral sites so that you can then contact them to offer greater incentives for further referrals in the future. These incentives most often take the form of guest blog posts for their website.
Google Analytics also gives its users access to the ‘Scraper’ tool, which is a Google Chrome extension that takes a look at your current top referral sites, and generates a list of similar sites that you can then target with referral opportunities.
This can help you to slowly continue building greater recognition for your brand.
As well as this, more referral links to your website also means that your webstore will rank higher on search engines, leading to even better recognition!
3 – Analyze The Effectiveness Of Campaigns
A major part of running an online business is ensuring that people are aware of it. This includes sending out promotional emails, creating guest blog posts for other websites, or getting involved with affiliate marketing.
It’s worth getting involved with as many advertising campaigns as possible, but you will also want to make sure that each one is working for you, and yielding results that are worthwhile.
To this end, you can use Google Analytics to analyze the success of each campaign you are involved with.
This will allow you to either improve the effectiveness of certain campaigns, or swap those campaigns out entirely for more effective campaigns.
Google Analytics will also show you what users tend to do after clicking your referral links, which can help you to optimize your user experience, making your conversion funnel much more effective.
4 – Utilize The Power Of Keywords
Alongside Google Analytics, make sure to make use of Google AdWords to get a sense of which keywords are proving most successful.
Whether long-tail keywords or simple keywords, Google AdWords will help you to see which keywords are leading to greater success with customer conversion, and which ones are proving most beneficial for your pipeline.
Using Google AdWords alongside Google Analytics can prove incredibly powerful and effective, and can help you to identify the keywords that are proving most effective, so that you can implement them into future content, to make your pipeline more efficient, and generate more revenue.
They can also both help you to identify the keywords that aren’t working so well, so that you can swap them out with more effective keywords that lead to greater sales. Using both tools together can lead to increased sales and success in no time at all!
Google Analytics can make it easy to create your own personalized goals that you can use to help increase web traffic to your store, and then lead to a stronger conversion pipeline.
Google Analytics actually allows you to insert your own goals directly into the platform, so you can more easily gauge your progress towards them, and implement effective steps to help you reach them.
Not using Google Analytics can make it much tougher to create realistic goals and to stick to them, as it can become harder to track your progress towards them, thus you should make sure to use it to guide your business into the future and help it to succeed.
6 – Use Social Acquisition Reporting
It is perhaps more important than ever to make use of social media to help drive the success of your online business.
Many webstore referrals are now driven strongly by social media posts and clicks, so you will want to make sure that your social media content is proving effective.
Google Analytics gives you direct access to the ‘Social Media Google Analytics Report’ to find out which posts are leading to link clicks, and most importantly, which posts are leading to higher rates of conversion.
This will not only help you to know which social media platforms are leading to the greatest amount of traffic, but also help you to improve the traffic on some of your lower performing platforms.
The tools will also help you to identify what kinds of content are most effective in drawing new customers to your store, which will help you to streamline your content creation, so that you can spend less time gambling on content, and more time on making money!
To Wrap Up
There you have it! These are just 6 easy ways that you can use Google Analytics to your advantage to really level up your online store, and generate more sales than ever before!
Make sure to try all of these tips out for yourself, and give them time to really bear fruit.
Getting started with Google Analytics can prove incredibly daunting to start with, but we hope that this guide has helped to show you that with the right approach to its many tools, you can very quickly start boosting your online sales and make your online business the success you always knew it would be!
These days, everything is online. You can’t get your business anywhere without a great online presence. With search engines forever changing, it’s difficult to stay on top of it all! That’s where I’ll come in.
Hello, my name is Jack O’Neil and I have been in the marketing industry for almost 10 years. I focus on online marketing, SEO, advertising, and more.
