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5 Reasons Why I’m Thankful for Google Analytics

Written by Justin Givens | 11/27/13 4:53 PM

During the month of November, everyone begins making list of what they are most thankful for. Now I have plenty I’m thankful for, my wife, wonderful family, my friends and so much more. But when it comes to work, I’m very thankful for Google Analytics. It is such a powerful system that allows everyone to learn so much about their customers.

Wait…what is Google Analytics?

“Google Analytics is a service offered by Google® that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales…” ~ Wikipedia.

So with that, here are the top 5 reasons I’m thankful for Google Analytics.

1. It is free!

This product provides us so much information and so much data to look at that I’m still amazed that it is free. FREE! No cost, nothing. Just your time to click around, view the reports, and learn about your visitors. Compared to other web analytics products you will either spend a good bit of money or get way less detailed information as you do from Google Analytics.

2. It has User Management Controls

When you need to make informed decisions related to your digital marketing campaigns, you need facts to look at. The User Management Controls in Google Analytics allows you, your colleagues, or IIAB to all see the same information without sending passwords around the Internet. So when having a client meeting to discuss your digital campaigns and website performance, you can all look at the same reports and make decisions based on facts instead of speculation.

3. It provides Shared Reports

When a you need all of your marketing team to review specific website stats, the Shared Reports feature makes it easy. You can tweak and perfect the report in private, then share the report with your team. No need to send long, confusing instructions on how build the report; they can easily view the stats within your the Shared Reports. Also, they can edit the report.

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4. You can see ecommerce information

Website shopping carts can push ecommerce data to Google Analytics. Allowing you to see the total revenue, customer traffic source, time to purchase, and much more for a specified date range. Again, this information can be used to make informed decisions related to your ecommerce UI design and flow as well as the performance of marketing campaigns. For example, if you run a email marketing campaign and direct them to a specific product page, and they checkout, you would see the source of email/transactional in the report. Now you can directly see ROI!

5. Learn about your bounce rate.

High bounce rate is very bad for you and for your customers. It means you are not capturing potential customers when they visit a specific webpage. Your potential customers are leaving (or closing) your site without ever engaging with your site. NOO!!! Come back, you say, with an Adwords Campaign or email marketing campaign! But again, no engagement and they leave!! Why can’t you catch their attention? Analytics allows you to make tweaks to your web pages and monitor their performance!

I’m thankful for the information that Google Analytics provide us on a daily basis.