The often forgotten power of Google Analytics

I built my first website in 2006

I built my first website in 2006.

LifeByWater.com started off as a place for a friend and I to share stories from our white water kayaking trips. Iteration by iteration it grew from a small blog into an online shop where other kayakers could buy their gear. It funded part of my paddling habit and it gave me a place to learn the basics of web design. I lost count of how many times that site was rebuilt from scratch in on WordPress or Joomla, or with no CMS in HTML. It was fun.

I’m not sure when I first included Google Analytics, but I do remember how it changed everything. For the first time we could see how many people accessed the site and what they did there. We could see how much time people spent on specific pages, where they came from and where they were before they left.

Although I don’t personally do any web design anymore I try to ensure that Google Analytics is added to every website I’m remotely involved in. I currently have 40 websites and apps on my GA profile — although many of the sites, like LifeByWater.com, aren’t active anymore.

Google Analytics has got smarter and more powerful since I first used it. I increasingly feel like I only scrape the surface of what it can do.

It always surprises me when people say that they don’t have analytics on their sites. It’s free, setup is straightforward, integration is simple and it very easy to make sense of the basics. How can you run a website and not know who uses it? How can you run a business and not know what your potential clients do while accessing one of your most important channels?

Here are some of the beginner features of GA that are vital to almost every entrepreneur, site manager or marketer. The screenshots are from different sites, with vastly different traffic and audiences profiles.

1. Traffic overview

Get a breakdown of how many people have accessed your site per hour, day, week or month for a customer range that can go as far back as to when you’ve had GA setup.

Monthly users since April 2013

2. Geography

Does most of your traffic come from within your city or country? Where do you focus your marketing?

Visualization of traffic per province in South Africa

3. Devices

Is your website mobile friendly? Yes. Good, 62% of your traffic comes from mobile devices while 5% is from tablets.

Traffic per device category

4. Behavior

There are many reasons why it’s important to know what people do on your site. With this info you can see what type of content people like, what products are being viewed and how many people go from your landing page to your checkout page.

Pageviews for an online shop

5. Demographics

Do you target your site towards males 35 and over? Does your website traffic suggest the same?

Visitor age breakdown

5. Realtime

It is very fulfilling to know that people are on your site as we speak. Having this capability will give you an instant indication of whether a campaign is having an effect. Plus, it’s a great way to see if you are recording your traffic.

The realtime dashboard

6. Acquisition

How do people get to your site? Is it social media? Which platform works best for you, Facebook or Twitter?

Traffic sources

Traffic by social network

7. Get your reports emailed to you

You don’t need to access accounts.google.com to get your info. Design weekly and monthly dashboards that get emailed to you every Monday or on the last day of each month. That way you’re always on top of your traffic.

This is emailed to me on the first of every month