What is this article? This is part of our new marketing series helping fitness owners learn what they really need to know to market their businesses. This is guide #2 of 7. To find the other guides, return to the overview page, here.
After launching your website, your next step is to start tracking your website's popularity and traffic. Using a website traffic checker and web services such as Google Analytics can show you important data such as who is visiting your website, where they are visiting your website from, how they found your website, and what they are viewing.
In this guide, we are going to share the importance of tracking that information, what valuable lessons you can learn and decisions you can make using Google Analytics, and how to set up your account. Clare Eaton, owner of Feel Good Health and Fitness is back to share her Google Analytics traffic for her brand new website. Let's get started.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free tools for tracking the people visiting your website, otherwise known as website traffic. It can gather data on desktops, mobile devices, and tablet apps making tracking traffic more accessible. Google Analytics includes all types of figures and metrics that you can view to see what is going on in your website and what people are coming to your website looking for.
You only need one account for your entire business and only need to set it up once for it to start working for you.
It's really as simple as that.
But...before you start wondering if is tracking the actual people visiting your website, we'll stop you there. Google Analytics tracks their actions, meaning that when a person comes to your website from anywhere online via Google itself, an app, social media, or another website where your business and website are mentioned, it will tell you along with the information it knows about from where, why, and how.
Using this information you can make important business decisions and improve your marketing strategies to ensure you are targeting the right markets and areas.
Google Analytics serves one major purpose and that's to help you make important and better decisions for your business. Supported by real-time actual data, it gives you page insights such as being able to see exactly what people like about your website, whether they are using it to book your classes, and what you can do to ensure customers find you. It's one thing to make decisions based on what you think will work, but when you have a free tool that can show you, you'll be in much better shape.
It sure can be! There are so many different options and things to track using Google Analytics. But when it comes to getting the data you need right now, there are some key areas you can focus on, and save the rest for down the road as you get more comfortable using the tool.
Your Google Analytics will provide you with several useful reports that you can use to track the most important information Google has to offer. To make it simple for you, we will break down those reports, and you can find a glossary of the terms we mention at the end of this guide. We used an overview of Clare's data from the first month her website was live. Those reports are:
The audience report tells you everything you need to know about your website visits. You can see if they are new or returning, how long they stay on your website, what their average bounce rate is, and what pages they view, all of this information can be found in this report.
Keep reading to find out more about the information you need from Google Analytics
The real-time report tells you how many active users are on your website and on your top active pages. You'll also be able to see how long your website visitors usually visit your website.
Your acquisition report tells you where your website visitors are coming from. Directly to your website, via social media, or via organic searches on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can also see if they came to your website by specific social media pages, or by referrals from other websites.
The location overview gives you insight as to where your website visitors are actually coming from, by location: country or city.
The pages report tells you the pages your website visitors visit and interact with details such as how long, bounce rate, and new or returning user.
The mobile overview tells you what devices do your website visitors use to find your website, mobile, tablet, or desktop and the breakdown.
The active users report how your active users were trending over periods of time and how many users have visited your site.
This report tells you how well you retained your website visitors over periods of time, meaning whether or not they came back to your website within a period of time.
Once your account is set up you'll be able to use these reports to monitor your website activity and better understand your target markets and how to achieve your goals.
Find out how to open a google analytics account
Now that you know what Google Analytics can do for you, your website, and your business, it's time to open your account. You can start, here. If you don't yet have a Google Account, you must first create one to access Google Analytics.
Once you have signed up you'll be prompted to start measuring your account and to set it up. We will be using Clare Eaton's Google Analytics account as our example.
You will need to put:
Your Google Analytics Home dashboard is your quick insight into what is going on in your business and gives you a snapshot of the reports we discussed above.
From your home page or using the left sidebar, you can navigate your reports and investigate specific behaviours of your website visitors.
We understand that Google Analytics can be a little complicated at first to use and navigate. Fortunately, we're here to help you. Not only can Google Analytics help you better understand your website, but it can help you track your conversion rate or the people who visit your website and then go on to book a class or sign up for a membership. Using Google Analytics you can set goals that you would like your customers to complete, for example:
and so on. As this is an advanced feature, our customer support team needs to integrate your account for you, but it's quick easy, and won't take us any time at all. If you would like to integrate your TeamUp account and Google Analytics account to set up the goals and track your conversion rates y, please follow the steps in our guides here:
Alongside Google Analytics, there are other platforms you can also use to monitor and track the growth of different aspects of your website.
MozBar is a free Google Chrome Extension, that offers both a free and paid (MozPro) subscription. MozBar shares important link metrics for your website such as Domain Authority, Page Authority, and backlinks to your website. As your website grows and you include elements such as internal and external links, follow and no-follow links, and meta tags, MozBar can help you monitor the increase in your website's relevancy on popular search engines such as Google.
Google Trends is a free Google application that helps you track the most relevant and trending topics being searched on the web daily. Use Google Trends to search popular terms for your business type, see what other people are searching for, and which keywords are most relevant to use in your own website and content in order for organic traffic to be driven to your website.
SEMrush is one of the most used tools in SEO. For anyone starting out on their SEO journey, we wouldn't recommend SEMrushing into signing up for an account, partly due to the price with plans starting at $100 per month, but also because tools like keyword planner are a good starting off point and sufficient enough if you're just looking to improve your Google rankings by creating SEO-strong content.
When you become more proficient in SEO and your website starts to grow, then investing in a tool like SEMrush will actually prove very useful. You can track all facets of your page's SEO from bounce rates and views to specific keywords and phrases that you've been implementing on your website and much more. Plans start at $100/month.
Google Alerts is another free Google application where you can set up alerts to be sent directly to your email inbox anytime a term or keywords, such as your business's name, are mentioned in an online news article, blog post, website, discussion, and so on. You can even go as far as to track the alerts for a specific region and language and receive only the most relevant alerts or all.
We could provide you with a dictionary long guide of the terms, features, and reports Google Analytics can show you, but when it comes to you and your business right now, these are the most important metrics to track and things to look out for in each report:
Once your website and Google Analytics account are up and running, the next step is to build your SEO strategy which includes adding highly searched keywords and adding content to your website. In the next guide, we will discuss how to find these keywords, use the information you already know is used to find your business, and how to implement a regular content schedule. Start reading guide #3, here.