Google Analytics can both identify opportunities and notify you of website problems. In most cases your website could be providing you with valuable insights into your market, and it’s free.
Marketing
Let’s say that your market changes often and leaves you less than certain about a particular direction to go in. The normal solution is to do some research on your options and then make a decision.
But what if there is no research you can do to decide? Well you’d go with your best choice and then you’d watch carefully to see if that decision is working well.
Guessing at the future of your business might not sit well with you, but websites can use Google Analytics to both help make the decisions and understand how decisions impact clients.
In fact Google Analytics is so well built that many organizations will test marketing/business strategies they normally wouldn’t feel are worth testing because of how easy it is to deploy and evaluate changes online.
Traffic & Trends
Saying that markets change often is an understatement. The frequency with which something will become popular, only to be replaced by something else, is frankly mind boggling.
Just when you’re sure you should order more from Manufacturer A, the competing brand could post an exciting new video advertisement that sends customers to you looking for that item. Coupons, endorsements, cross-promotions, mentions, etc.. At any moment a trend can be born or drop off.
Google Analytics will give you both real-time and historical views of your traffic and the trends that are influencing your industry.
Segment Value
Understanding what a segment of customers means to your business in terms of value can help you make crucial decisions. Thinking of limiting the age of clients so that you can carry a more focused lineup of exclusive items?
Getting statistics that tell you what growing one segment will bring in while losing another segment could save a business from an irreversible mistake.
If you enable Google Analytics with the Demographics feature you will get to see the Age, Gender, and Interests. We recently talked about the Demographics feature and Google Analytics Versions in our blog.
Site Design
Google Analytics gives web developers very detailed information to make content/design changes.
Reports will show you which pages your traffic lands on helping you prioritize efforts for content/design work.
Find the sections and pages that work the best for your customers by reviewing pages which show visitors spent more time reading/interacting.
Learn the routes that users take to get to destinations and either improve on these or use the information to help optimize the website.
Spot bad pages where bounce rates are high and the page is either not well developed or simply getting the wrong traffic sent to the page.
Cost
Google Analytics is totally free to install and use for websites with less than 10 million hits per month.
Sites over 10 million monthly hits can upgrade to the Google Analytics Premium service to handle the requests that go past the normal limits.
Reports can be customized and then emailed out to recipients on a regular interval so that no extra work or cost is needed to stay on top of the information from Google Analytics.