Taking a business online is a natural step of brand evolution in today’s digital era. While functioning offline has its advantages, going digital greatly enhances your reach, and with e-commerce gaining traction, there’s a lot of profits to dig into as well. As such, it is quite common for businesses to start with a website and optimise it for Google Search to supercharge their sales cycle. It is at this stage that the important tool known as Google Analytics comes into play.
This tool gives you detailed reports on the performance of your website, your active campaigns, your traffic, and the ROI of your efforts. But, for the uninitiated or inexperienced, there exists the possibility of important data being misinterpreted or going unnoticed altogether. This results in misleading inferences, which can restrict your business’ ability to grow online.
To avoid such roadblocks, take a look at 5 common mistakes to avoid when using Google Analytics for your business.
Failing to filter internal session data
Whether you’re a large or small organisation that’s gone online, there is bound to be traffic coming in from your own employees. This is something that is picked up by Google Analytics and it is important that you know to segregate internal traffic from the actual traffic you’re looking to track. Failing to do this can lead to skewed results and give you an inaccurate measure of the website’s true performance. To avoid this, set up filters to exclude internal data from the final report.
Misusing or underutilising UTM parameters
An Urchin Tracking Module or UTM is a tag that you add to URLs when you’re looking to track traffic based on its source. This comes in handy when you have affiliate networks in operation or have ads running and you’re looking to measure their efficacy. UTM parameters will show you exactly how much traffic originated from a particular link and give you additional valuable information too. As such, it is important to use this provision to its fullest, especially if you have campaigns in action. Underutilising this feature will result in lesser data available for proper ROI assessments.
Setting the incorrect time zone
When it comes to assessing and noting business insights, it is important to have the most accurate information. Here, something as small as setting the right time zone plays an important role. This is particularly important for business websites with a global audience as inaccurate results for parameters like conversions, payment timings, active hours, and others can be affected. The same holds for businesses whose analytics are overseen by a marketing firm abroad.
Skipping over setting up goals
Even with the standard Google Analytics setup, you can get a lot of insights and data from your website. However, for effective marketing and online operations, this isn’t sufficient. Sticking to the default tracking options is a mistake and you should set up goals based on your business’ operations. In Google Analytics, goals can be anything and can be used to track virtually any activity that happens on the website. A good metric to actively track is revenue as all data gathered via this stream can be used to increase your bottom line.
Ignoring audience behaviour based on device
Audience behaviour is a key metric to track on any website. You need to know which audiences you are interacting with, for how long, and what these interactions lead to. This data reveals potential gaps in the sales funnel you’ve created and can help you address leaks. Google Analytics helps you go one step further and track audience behaviour based on the device in use. This way, you know how the website is being interacted with and what to optimise it for. Without this information, you may assume that most of your traffic comes via desktop while ignoring the other platforms like mobile. As such, a large tranche of your traffic may have an un-optimised experience, which can ultimately affect your ability to convert leads into sales.
Using Google Analytics is an essential part of running a business online as it removes guesswork from the equation and gives you a clear understanding of your marketing efforts. However, it is a comprehensive tool and priming it for optimal performance can be quite daunting. For effortless progress online, and to track the right KPIs, grow your business with Edisol. Our trained professionals bring quality and efficiency to every marketing strategy, ensuring you get results on Google, and quickly!
