Many small businesses think they don’t have the skills or resources necessary to invest precious time delving into the analytics to fine-tune customer engagement strategies. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Google Analytics is a service to track and measure traffic to your website. Knowing who’s coming to your site, how they found you, and which pages they visit helps you to know what they need and whether they’re satisfied. It provides a simple way to manipulate and manage information about your customers, sales patterns, and user experiences.
Leveraging Google Analytics add-ons is one thing every small business owner can do to improve customer relations and generate leads, all without making an enormous financial investment or diverting huge chunks of time away from customer support or sales activities. You may be thinking that you simply don’t have the time to learn something new, but Google Analytics add-ons are not only powerful, they’re easy to use.
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Google Sheets
If you’re using spreadsheets to track sales activity or financial records, Google Sheets and the Google Sheets add-on will eliminate the tedious task of manually importing and exporting data. Create custom formulas, design dashboards with embedded visuals, and schedule automated reports for “real-time” data. Plus, it’s easy to overlay sharing and privacy parameters.
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Goals
Goals is an add-on every small business owner should embrace. Setting and achieving goals is what drives business success. Use the Goals add-on to find out if website visitors are getting your message. If you’re asking someone to place an order, download a coupon or sign up for a weekly newsletter, you can capture valuable information about which pages they visit on the way to the CTA, what devices they’re using, their geographical location, and many other details about their experience with your brand. Watch this video to learn more about how Goals can influence your marketing objectives and revenue stream.
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Funnel Visualization
This tool allows you to monitor the buying stages of your customers and where you lose them. If they get all the way to checkout but don’t complete the transaction, for example, you can then take steps to fix this problem.
Funnel Visualization and Goal reporting are similar, but the information and patterns gleaned from each add-on is slightly different. Though Funnel Visualization reports don’t show retroactive data, it does have its advantages, such as faster refresh rates than Goal reports. This Google article gives you a side-by-side comparison of the pros and cons of these two add-on and explains how small business owners can customize each to their advantage.
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Smart List
Creating custom lists empowers small business owners to target their audience and shape their engagement activities. The Smart List add-on allows you to create lists based on hyper-sensitive rules. Unlike static lists, which require a lot of time to update and maintain, smart lists are constantly refreshing based on your business activities. Four common applications for smart lists are:
- Unique e-mail marketing lists based on contact behavior
- Outbound call lists
- Lifecycle stage lists that quickly identify how many contacts are in each stage of engagement
- List of contacts with a certain quality or behavior pattern, such as when a customer has made prior purchases or qualified for store credit
When your website visitors contact your brand via e-mail or social media, you’ll have information about their experience. You can also create lists based on form submission, event relationships, and page views.
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Track Everything
There are several really good event tracking add-ons for WordPress users. Track Everything allows you to customize tracking beyond the standard Google Analytics defaults, so you can track not just actions, but interactions. In fact, you can track almost any common event (i.e. behavior) using CSS selectors. Easily track form submissions, e-mails, and external links.
One last note. If your small business isn’t currently using both Google Analytics (GA) and Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), today is the time to start. Leveraging data generated by your web traffic to improve user experiences, engage new consumers, and share valuable content is essential. Linking these accounts puts everything in one place where you can keep an eye on your digital relationships.
