As a business owner, you may or may not be familiar with the term “analytics” pertaining to your company website. In layman’s terms, “analytics” is the reporting (or measurement) of web data via collection and analysis to identify ways to best optimize your company’s website usage. In other words, the goal isn’t simply to gauge the amount of traffic attracted to your website. Analytics is an invaluable business tool when it comes to better understanding your target market and improving the efficacy of your business website.

Google Analytics offers several ways that can provide information to benefit your business:

How do customers find your business?

As a business owner, you need to know whether people are going to your website directly or via search engines. Google Analytics allows you to easily track all online sources in order to determine the best channel for website traffic. Some of the most common channels are: social media, search engines, referral, email, paid advertising and display advertising. Once you identify how customers find your website, you can develop a targeted marketing strategy for continued growth.

How do consumers use your website?

You can see which pages of your website people visit the most, how long they stay on your website and how many pages they visit before they leave. Google Analytics gathers data, such as average session duration, bounce rates, exit rates, page views and site searches. Knowledge of behavioral data is powerful, providing you with valuable info on which pages are most attractive to consumers.

What are your website goals?

Most websites will have various goals that they want to achieve. For example, did the user make a purchase, fill out a form, subscribe or play a video? While your goals and events will differ from other business websites, they must be tailored to help you achieve your desired business outcomes.

What type of customer are you attracting?

Knowing your user demographics is extremely valuable data. If the user has opted in and permitted access to their data, you can gather extremely helpful information, such as user location, time zone, gender, the device they’re on, and the browser they’re using.

What is your target audience interested in seeing on your website?

Google Analytics shows you which posts performed the best on your website. This helps you to generate more ideas for creating new content around specific topics. You can also find out which posts aren’t doing so well and if you need to update them.

The best feature of all: It’s free. You can gain valuable information for absolutely nothing! You literally have nothing to lose!

Google Analytics allows you to go in-depth or keep things as simple as you’d like. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Either way, you stand to strengthen your website and overall business ROI when employing Google Analytics to best track your website’s performance.