What Can Google Analytics Tell You?

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Page One Marketing

On first glance, this business owner was happy with his 412 visits. Unfortunately, that didn’t tell the real story. This is a local business, selling products to other businesses in the Phoenix area. They don’t ship to or do business overseas. So the fact that 140 of the visits were from outside of Arizona (some were even from China!) makes those visits pretty useless to them.

We also found that 232 visits were either from the visitor typing in their web address or clicking on a link (maybe in an email or on a business card). Now if the business owner had tagged all the links in their email newsletters and other sources, they’d be able to tell exactly which of those efforts were working for them.

What about traffic from the search engines?

It looks like 115 visits were from a visitor typing a search term into the search engine and then finding this business’ website in the results. But let’s look at that a little closer. Remember, we only care about traffic from Arizona and people who didn’t already know the business name (because they would find us anyway). So the only ones we care about in this case are search terms without the company name, in Arizona. Turns out there were only 15 of those searches.

So the real story was…

This was a real eye-opener for the business owner who initially thought his internet marketing strategy was performing pretty well for him since he saw 412 visits. It gave a pretty good explanation for why the phone wasn’t ringing!

Stay tuned for my next post which will give details about the Best Practices for setting up your Google Analytics to give you better results. And you may be interested in our August Special: a Google Analytics Check Up (or new installation) for only $49. Call us for more informa tion.