Let’s be real: If you’re not using Google Analytics, you’re missing out. You may have a gorgeous website with stunning images and stellar content, but if you don’t know how your site is performing, what’s the point?
That may sound harsh, but the truth is a website should always be a work-in-progress. Understanding your site’s performance allows you to see what’s working and what’s not and can give you a clearer idea of what you need to change and improve. You should take time to review your website and nurture it in order to drive more traffic and leads and thus get more business.
This is where Google Analytics comes in. This free tool can give you a better understanding of your visitors, your website performance, SEO metrics, and much more. By using Google Analytics, you can improve your website’s ranking, increase conversions, and help grow your business.
Understand where your visitors come from
Google Analytics allows you to easily see how users get to your website, whether from organic search, paid advertising, or social media. With this understanding of what channels work best for your business, you can focus more time and effort on the channels that matter. For example, if most visitors come to your website from paid advertising, now you know that your ads are working, and you may want to increase your advertising budget.
Know what social media works for you
Not only can you see what channels your visitors use, but you can also see which social media platforms are working best for your business. If you have a lot of traffic from Facebook or Instagram, for example, you know that focusing on those platforms and posting regularly is worthwhile, and you may even want to do paid advertising to increase traffic from these platforms to your website.
Recognize your strongest content
With Google Analytics, you can see which web pages or blog posts are driving the most traffic to your site. This knowledge is extremely helpful because you can then optimize your top-performing content, as well as create similar content to bring in more visitors. At the same time, you can see what content is performing poorly and decide whether to revise or remove that content from your site.
Set goals to reach
Google Analytics allows you to set up goals for what you want visitors to your website to do. For example, maybe you want users to fill out a form. By setting that action as a goal in Google Analytics, you can track how many visitors are performing that action and determine if your goal success rate is improving over time. You can even analyze potential weaknesses of your site that may be preventing users from taking the desired action.
Determine which pages have high bounce rates
A bounce is when someone comes to your site and then leaves without taking any action. Google Analytics can show you which pages on your site have high bounce rates, giving you insight into content or functionality that needs to be improved. Once you know which pages have high bounce rates, take a closer look at them from the perspective of a potential client and pay attention to what works and doesn’t work or any content that is unclear.
Clean your Google Analytics account data
You can actually unify your source data and measure all the traffic from apps and websites together. For example, you can see all Facebook sources, whether mobile or desktop, in one line of data, simplifying your analytics.
By putting all your data for one channel together, you can then see which marketing channel is responsible for acquiring the most new users or driving the most traffic across the different platforms you use.
You can also prevent referral SPAM from showing up in your analytics. Referral SPAM are those suspicious-looking websites you may sometimes see in your analytics. They can skew your results and make you think you’re getting more referral traffic than you actually are.
These are just a few of the benefits that Google Analytics can provide to help you make the most of your photography website. By using the knowledge from this free tool, you can make improvements to your website, driving more traffic, and potentially resulting in the growth of your business.
Ready to get started with Google Analytics? Check out our Google Analytics course to help you set up and get going with Google Analytics for your business. Or if you need help getting your account set up, we can configure your goals, tracking and events in your account. Click here to learn more.
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