There are numerous analytics packages out there that many will agree are more effective than Google Analytics, but Google Analytics is free, fairly comprehensive and it will give you reasonably good information about what you might need to do to improve your marketing results. It comes with a warning, however: you just might get hooked on analytics.

One of the very important aspects of content marketing is that it is an extremely important way to boost your search engine rankings. There are people out there promoting the idea that you use massive amounts of verbiage to get you Googling well. But make no mistake: if the real human visitors to your site don’t understand what you’re telling them, then you won’t make the sale. They’ll be gone and you will be eating their dust.

Every person who has a website can have that website registered for free with Google Analytics. When you log into your account, you will be able to look at mountains of information about how many people have been coming to your website, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed, where they were online before they got to your site, what country they’re from, what language they speak and on and on and on.

Why is that important? It’s important because you can learn what parts of your content marketing strategy are working well and which ones need fine tuning just by looking at the Google Analytics information. If you have very few visitors to your site, and they are bouncing off almost as soon as they get there, then you probably need to beef up your other online properties and give people a compelling reason to visit your website while improving the content you have on the site itself.

If you have a lot of visitors to your site, and they are coming from a lot of other online locations, but your visitors bounce off your site on the home page, then you need to look at what you’re offering and how well you’re targeting your ideal clients. It’s a very complex topic area. Of course, all of this helps improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results, which feeds directly into your efforts to funnel visitors to your site.

I resisted learning about my analytics for a Very Long Time. I’m a writer, not a mathematician, and for years I self-identified as “Bad At Numbers.” Why on Earth would I want to belabour the point by subjecting myself to the humiliation of struggling with an Analytics account?! Even in university I took the easiest statistics course on campus and the fact that I somehow managed to pull off an “A” did nothing to make a love of statistics blossom in my heart. Those were the days when a computer took up an entire room and we had to spend hours painstakingly punching our code into stacks of cards to run a program whose purpose escaped me entirely. Businesses didn’t have websites and how delightful it is for me today, by contrast, to first of all have a website to play with and, second of all to be able to easily find out how people are experiencing it: I open a browser, type in a url and select a topic about which I want to learn more. The information shows up and all I have to do is look at it and think about it. Easy peasy!

Somewhere along the road between “I hate numbers” to “I love analytics” I had an epiphany: numbers point the way to improvement. Full stop. So even for writers like me, who adore language and struggle with formulae, there is a really good reason for becoming immersed in statistics and that reason comes right down to Revenue Generation.

If you’d like some help with your Google Analytics information, why not get in touch? My team and I are standing by to provide assistance on this and any other content marketing challenges you might be facing, contact us.