Google Analytics 101

Google Analytics allows you to see what’s really going on in your customer’s mind. It's also the best tool to analyze the lead capture ability of your website. Imagine a hunter in the woods at night. Looking through his night vision googles, he scans for deer amongst the trees. When spotted, he knows exactly where to aim and pull the trigger. Google Analytics is a marketer's way of "hunting" the web, and the ultimate way to monitor website traffic.

So how does it work? Google Analytics allows users to see who is visiting their website in real-time. It can go down to countries, state, cities, zip code, male or female, age and more. It also lets you know what pages people are using most. It also tells you whether or not someone is going to one page and then leaving, which is called the bounce rate. Quick tip: you want to lower the bounce rate as much as possible. Usually anything below 30 is a good bounce rate.

For example, at 4C, we are in the process of optimizing a website for one of our clients. We are hoping to boost their SEO and increase their awareness in traffic by using Google analytics. For us, this looks like running in-depth analysis on their site, which involves creating keyword lists and tracking the number of people searching those specific keyword terms. Afterwards, we use the data to optimize their SEO.

A testimonial to the importance of Google Analytics comes from one of our clients, Safran Software Solutions.  After running a SEO analysis alone, their website traffic increased by 240%. We know what to target because of Google Analytics.

All in all, Google Analytics is a powerful tool to see if a website's SEO is actually working – from web development, to social media and graphics, it monitors the SEO effectiveness at all levels. It’s when you can see on all platforms where and how to target your marketing with the webs night vision goggles that allows you to understand and pull the trigger toward your company's effectiveness.