The market is tough for home builders and designers trying to attract new clients. The best way to reach more potential customers is to have an effective and widespread online presence.
Many home design businesses lack the time to develop a well thought out web marketing strategy, but a handy tool known as Google Analytics can help you assess your current online marketing performance and help you develop a strategy that works for your business.
Google Analytics can seem intimidating at first, but it's an important tool that is worth your time to set up and use so you can see the impact of your online presence.
What is Google Analytics
Google Analytics gathers your web presence statistics and displays them so you can see the effects of your online marketing strategy. Think of it as a dashboard where you can quickly assess when, how and where people are interacting your home design company on the World Wide Web. There are seven different statistics Google Analytics provides:
- Traffic
- Channels and Sources of Visitors
- Conversions
- Engagement
- Demographics
- Technology Used by Visitors
- Interests
There's a lot to cover about what these statistics mean, so we'll just break it down quickly to give you a view of what you'll learn by utilizing Google Analytics.
Traffic will tell you how many browsers have landed on your website. This data can be coordinated with the channels, or sources, to let you know exactly where your traffic is coming from. Some examples of channels include e-mail marketing, Google search, a paid ad, SEO or social media.
From there, the data available gets a little more specific. You can learn more about conversion, or how much revenue has been generated by each section of your website. These conversion statistics can be coupled with engagements, or which pages get the most views, to give you an overall picture of the most profitable pages on your site.
Finally, there are a few charts relating to the demographics of your website visitors. You can learn information about geographic location, ages, genders and interests your visitors have. You'll also be able to see what devices browsers use when interacting with your site. Knowing the proportion of smartphone browsers to PC visitors can help you completely understand where, when and how guests are visiting your website.
Why You Need Google Analytics
As you can see, there's a lot to be learned by taking advantage of Google Analytics, but why should home designers invest the time it takes to understand this information?
Quite simply, the more you know, the better you can adapt to bring in more users and keep them interacting with your website. Let's take a look at web traffic for example. Let's say that you notice a period of days or weeks where you've gained more traffic before it fell off again. Actually seeing this information lets you know that there was a period of time when you were probably doing something right but stopped doing it causing a decrease in traffic. Seeing spikes and declines can give you a good idea of what part of your marketing strategy is bringing in new potential business.
In this case, don't neglect your data on channels. If you see a spike in traffic from social media, you may wish to invest more time in that avenue, or if you're seeing very little visitors from paid advertising, you may wish to assess where your online dollars are going. This is where the demographic information can be enlightening.
Home builders and designers quite often have very little money to spend on marketing, so wasting it on avenues that aren't generating traffic simply isn't an option. By carefully assessing the channels, demographics and devices of users you can target appropriate markets rather than a wasting time and money on ads in with different targets.
Finally, it's very important to know which of your web pages generate the most revenue. If you have pages with little engagements, you may want to redesign those or remove them all together. Stick with designs and styles that keep users on your site and interacting with your business.
These are just a few of the great benefits of taking the time to sort through all of the statistics that can be provided by Google Analytics software.
In order to begin viewing your data via Google Analytics, you'll first have to set up a Google account. This step is free and fairly painless, and will give you access not only to Google Analytics, but other features Google has available for businesses.
Once you've completed that step, you can simply and quickly begin setting up your Google Analytics. The setup process will guide you through the entire process by asking you for relevant information such as the websites you wish to track, how you want to view your data and any other information that would help you track your data better. Finally, you need to add a tracking code to the header of your website, verify that it's working and you're all set and ready to go in a very brief amount of time.
If you have many different pages you'd like to track, the process can be time consuming to enter each one, but once you start receiving feedback on your web presence, you'll be glad you took the time to begin the process of utilizing Google Analytics.
