“What gets measured, gets done.”
While executives measure their business’ profits and losses, there’s one thing they often overlook measuring: their website.
“We just had our website done last year,” a potential client told me recently. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
But a quick check under the hood of the website showed an important piece was missing: Google Analytics, the industry standard in website analytics.
This little snippet of code communicates with Google every time someone visits your website and stores all kinds of wonderful information such as the visitor’s location, age, sex, browser, and device, as well as which pages someone viewed and how long he or she looked at them.
But the code wasn’t on their website, even though it was recently built.
All the website’s past visitors, user behavior, and knowledge were gone… never captured for review. (There’s no way to go back and recover that data since it wasn’t recorded in the first place.)
Another common problem we encounter: the code is installed but nobody knows how to access it. To access that information, you need access to the Google account that created the code.
Does your website have Google Analytics installed? Google explains how to check here or look in your website’s source code for references to analytics.js (for Universal Analytics) or ga.js (for classic Analytics).
If Google Analytics isn’t there, get it installed and start measuring your website!
Sifting through the data and reports will help you make business decisions based on actual customer behavior, rather than a hunch.