On the Brand It, Build It Podcast, we often say: Your website can be so much more than a place to showcase your products and services. Your website can be a place rooted in forming meaningful connections with your audience, serving and guiding your audience toward the products and services aligned with their needs, and ultimately, growing your small business. So, how does your website become a resource you can use to grow your small business? Beyond having a strong, purpose-driven visual foundation through your brand and web design — monitoring your website analytics or the ways in which your website is being used by your audience can make a big difference. Today, we want to share what website analytics are and why they matter.

What are website analytics and why do they matter?

At With Grace and Gold, we believe your web design should not only be beautiful and visually pleasing, but it should also be purpose-driven, conversion-focused, and rooted in your small business success. We know when our clients’ websites are working and converting their visitors to paying clients when our clients share their results with us — results like, “My revenue has doubled” or “I earned back my Investment in just one week!” Whether you’ve already invested in a professional web design, or you’re considering investing in a professional web design — it’s essential for your website to work on behalf of your small business. 

Google Analytics is a resource created by Google to help website owners — just like you — to understand your visitors and the ways your visitors use your website. By using Google Analytics, you can learn how many visitors are visiting, where those visitors have come from, how long visitors are spending on your website, the actions your visitors took while exploring your website — and, truly, so much more.

Put simply, your website analytics are the details — the data — about your visitors and how they engage with your website. Monitoring your analytics can help you to determine how effectively — or ineffectively — your audience is using your website. 

Website platforms like Showit and Squarespace make it easy to link your website to Google Analytics. Squarespace’s article “Using Google Analytics with Squarespace” and Showit’s linked article under Site Settings > Third Party will guide you through linking your website to Google Analytics seamlessly. 

Once linked, you’ll visit analytics.google.com to see your analytics — both your live visitors and detailed reports about past visitors. 

At With Grace and Gold, just a few reports we follow closely are:

• Acquisition Report: In our Acquisition Report, we can discover not only how many visitors our website is receiving, but we can also learn more about where visitors are coming from: from their organic search, by directly trying in our web address, from social media, a link from another website, or elsewhere. The Acquisition Report even shares which keywords are best for bringing visitors to your website.
• Pages Report: The Pages Report tells us which pages are visited most frequently. We can quickly peek in on today, yesterday, the past 7 days, 28 days, 90 days, and more.
• Behavior Flow: The Behavior Flow tells us how visitors are engaging with our website — which page they land on first, and which pages they navigate to next. 

There are a wide variety of reports to access and analyze within Google Analytics, but every report can provide helpful details about how visitors use and engage with your website. Maybe there is a blog post receiving a great deal of visitors, and you’d like to include a link to your newsletter or to a product within the blog post. Maybe you’ll discover that a page you no longer use or lead visitors to is still receiving a great deal of visitors — and learning this inspires you to update the page’s content. 

Altogether, using Google Analytics to understand how your visitors are engaging with and using your website can help you to make informed decisions about the way your website is organized, designed, and maintained. 

About Brand It, Build It Podcast, Hosted by Kelly Zugay

Hosted by Kelly Zugay, co-founder of With Grace and Gold, The Brand It, Build It Podcast is a leading small business marketing podcast for small business owners, creatives, founders and entrepreneurs. Enjoy weekly, actionable episodes to build a successful, sustainable small business from the inside out.