In a previous post I discussed how to get more visitors to your website so you can grow your wellness business . So now that you’ve put in place some ways to get traffic how do you know it's working. The answer is Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Google analytics is a free tool made by Google that measures the number of people who visit your website and each page on your website. If you have a website, then Google analytics is important to have set up.
Google analytics is just one part of the tool set that Google provides to help track your website performance.
Why you should use Google analytics
If your goal is to get more visitors to your website, then Google Analytics will help you to track that. You can’t improve what you don’t know. It can also help you to make improvements once you know what the users are doing on your website.
Google Analytics also helps you to see where your visitors are coming from and where they are landing. At one point I was looking at Google analytics and saw I was getting traffic coming from Pinterest. I wasn’t even using Pinterest so that was surprising. It also led me to start using Pinterest and I now get most of my traffic from Pinterest.
Google Analytics shows you what pages your visitors land on and where they go from there. This really helps you to make sure that these pages are optimized. If for example you have one blog post that everyone is going to, then you’ll want to make sure that you have a link to a free offer on that post.
You can also see how much time a user spends on your site and on each page they visit. If everyone is leaving a page right away, then you probably want to see what is wrong with that page. If a particular blog post is visited a lot, then make sure you have a good call to action on that post.
And you’ll also see the bounce rate. If a visitor lands on a page or blog post and then doesn’t check out anything else, then they have bounced. The idea is that if a visitor is checking out multiple pages on your site, they are really interest. So the lower the bounce rate the better.
One caveat with this is that if you have an external landing page linked to blog posts, then that will count as a bounce. So don’t be too concerned with this for now.
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How to set up Google Analytics
Before I getting started with Google Analytics set up, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- You won’t break your website by doing this
- The process is fairly simple, but if the tech really scares you or you just don’t want to deal with this yourself, then you have a couple of options. If you have a web designer or manager then, then ask them to do it. This is something I offer as part of my virtual assistant and website management packages so contact me to get more information.
The first thing you’ll need to do is create a Google account if you don’t already have one. It doesn’t have to be with the email associated with your website.
You can start by going to analytics.google.com. From here you will either be automatically signed into your Google account, or prompted to sign in or create an account.
You will then enter your account name, and continue with the onscreen prompts. Don’t worry about the app sections, unless you happen to have your own app.
The last step is creating your analytics account. You will be prompted to enter your website name and the URL of your website. Make sure you choose http or https correctly. This indicates whether your website is secure or not. You’ll see this at the beginning of the link for your website.
Once you have entered everything, just hit the create button. Agree to the terms and conditions and then make a copy of the analytics tracking code.
Adding Google Analytics to your website
But once you have your Google Analytics account set up, you are not done. You still need to add a piece of code to your website. How to do this depends on how your website was built.
With a WordPress site you can use a plugin. I’ve used MonsterInsights and I’ve used a simple plugin that adds code to the right place.
With MonsterInsights you should be able to connect automatically with access to your Google account. You will also have the option of adding the tracking code you just copied. Using MonsterInsights lets you see your analytics inside your WordPress dashboard.
If you use a code plugin (I use headers and footers), you’ll have to copy the code from google analytics. Your tracking code should’ve come up during the installation process. But if you need to get it again, then you can get the code again by clicking on the gear icon, then look at the create property settings, tracking info and click on Tracking code. This will bring up the tracking code you need.
Note: If you have a site designed by someone else make sure that they add your Google Analytics code for you. You can give them access to your Google Analytics account under Account Permissions.
Summary
You can’t improve what you don’t know. So if your goal is to get more visitors to your website, you should have Google Analytics installed. This will give you a baseline and an idea of where you need to improve.
If you are having trouble with Google Analytics, I include this as part of my monthly (or quarterly) website management package.
