If you are a small business owner wanting to have an online presence, installing the free Google Analytics tool should be one of your first priorities when setting up and building a responsive website.
Entrepreneurs use Analytics to track each element of their site. You can use it to determine how many visitors have visited your business website, for example. You can also use it to find out how much revenue you generated in a particular month, where your visitors are coming from, and which web pages they were interested in.
If you are worried that Analytics is sharing your personal details with the websites you visit, it’s important to know that it doesn’t share IP addresses, usernames, or any of your personal information.
Here are some useful tips for Google Analytics to help you monitor your website’s performance.
1. Install Page Analytics (Chrome extension)
When it comes to Google Analytics, one of the challenges is the time you will take to successfully navigate to your website, to sign in, and then find the right information.
This page extension for Chrome helps you to navigate to your site much faster. Once you install it, it will sit as a visible button on the toolbar of your Chrome browser.
When looking at your website, clicking this particular button will immediately reveal statistics about how many visitors are currently looking at that web page.
Additionally, when you expand the double arrow drop-down, you will find more data from it about how many users have visited that particular page in a given period, what they are doing there, and where they’re coming from.
You will also instantly receive a snapshot of how effective that page is by simply reviewing some statistics (e.g., ext rate and bounce stats). With this tool, you can also find out if the number of users visiting that page is going up or down.
2. Have your Analytics reports emailed to you automatically
If you want to log into Analytics to check the same reports, you should consider using a better and quicker solution. Why not have the reports automatically emailed to you so you can be more productive?
This means that you can read your reports offline in your free time, or even have them printed out at your convenience. You can also email the reports to your co-workers.
When you find the reports you want to look at regularly, click the “email” button instead of the shortcut. In your dialogue box, select the email address which you want the reports sent to, the format, the hour/day of the week, and the frequency.
In the text section, write a note to remind yourself exactly what the reports contain. The note will always be in the section of your received emails. If possible, you can add other reports to the same emails to avoid multiple mails that may bombard you.
3. Use the Google Tag Assistant
Most people rely on their developers to simply copy-paste the Analytics code onto their website. However, it’s very important to know if the code is indeed there and working properly.
There are some ways to check this, and one of the easiest is using the Google Tag assistant, another Chrome extension. It will inform you if the Analytics Tags have already been correctly installed on your website.
Once you install this extension, it will look like a simple button on the browser toolbar. When you click on the button, you will instantly get summarized reports about all the Google Tags correctly installed on the web page you are browsing.
4. Make use of the shortcuts
If you have a lot of questions about your site’s performance, such as the number of organic traffic coming from Google, you can just use the “Shortcuts” button in every analytical report.
Just click this button next time you look at the reports you need and provide your report with a title/name in the available dialogue box. This will instantly save a link to your reports in the ‘shortcuts’ menu beneath the dashboard found on the top-left.
5. Set up Custom Alerts
If your website is performing really well and then traffic suddenly drops, you can use Custom Alerts so that it doesn’t happen again. This tool serves as a good early warning sign if there is a huge change on your site.
It will send you an email alerting you that something needs to be fixed before it starts affecting your site’s performance, and eventually, your income.
When you are running a small business, having a responsive website is not enough. You need Google Analytics, an invaluable tool for online marketers and small business owners, to help you understand what is happening on your website and help you achieve your income goals.
Ready to take your business online? Use Bookmark’s sitebuilder to get you started.
Originally published at www.bookmark.com on May 24, 2016.
