How many visitors are coming to your site daily? Monthly? How are users finding your site? How much value does your site have in search for your market and for the keywords you want to target?

Can you answer any of these questions?

If not, it’s time to make sure that Google Analytics is installed on your website.

Effective and, most importantly, free, Google Analytics can show you a world of information you probably never knew about your site and your visitors. This information is vital for you to know who you’re marketing – or should be marketing – your products to. While there are hundreds of reasons why your company should have Google Analytics installed on its websites, here are the top five.

1. It’s Free – and Easy

Never will there be a concern of “how many units” this service is selling you this month because Google Analytics is completely free to use. Google Analytics monitors traffic to your site from search engines, referral sites and direct hits to your URL – all for free.

Not only is it free, but it’s easy to use and understand. Installing it on a website is easy and works on any website platform.

2.  Standardized Monitoring of Traffic

One of the best aspects about Google Analytics is that the metrics used in monitoring traffic will not change based on your platform. Now matter what the platform is, visitors are measured the same exact way with Google Analytics. Since Google Analytics can be moved from site to site if a website is moved, you never have to worry about how a new platform may be measuring visits, unique visitors, pageviews, etc.

3. Tracking of SEO Campaigns

With the help of Google Analytics it is possible to see how many people are finding your website through a keyword phrase. Google Analytics allows you to see how many people landed on your site that month (or any specified date range) from that keyword search.

The best way to track results is year over year, especially when looking at the seasonal effects of sales. Google Analytics allows you to compare year over year, month over month and everything in between as long as the code has been installed long enough.

4. Monitoring of Referral Traffic

Another excellent feature of Google Analytics is that the tool allows you to see where people are coming from. Now you’ll be able to see if your traffic is coming from third party vendor referrals, from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; from microsites; or from other sites like forums, press release sites and blogs.

If someone clicks through to the website from another site, such as YouTube, Google Analytics tracks this referral. These results can be found in the Referral Traffic tab under Traffic Sources.

5. Multi-Channel Sales Funnels and Goals

Reason five is a bit advanced, but ties in perfectly with the importance of being able to monitor referral traffic.

Multi-Channel Sales Funnels (MCSF) give a company the ability to track the actions a user took before entering the main site. Goals are set up to see if people are converting once they hit your site from one of the “funnels.” Keep in mind that this only works if the user is able to click a link that leads back to the main site and if there is a “Thank You” page set up after a user submits a form.

For example, if a user views a video from the company on YouTube and clicks through to the main site, the goal would be to have the user fill out a lead form. Once this form is filled out, the “Goal” has been completed. All of these steps are tracked within the MCSF feature. The Channel is YouTube, the Funnel is the “click” and the Goal is the lead form. This is a great tool to track ROI and to see how effective certain campaigns and services are.

point break

Like Bodi needs to catch that perfect wave (Point Break reference? Anyone?), your business needs Google Analytics. These five reasons alone should convince any company to make sure Google Analytics is installed and working properly on their website.

Your dealership could benefit from an SEO strategy involving Google Analytics. Contact us to learn more about our SEO services and how they could give your dealership an advantage.