In this series, we explore Google’s web analytics program in the light of small-business needs. Our first post introduces the concept of analytics and why Google’s program is a good choice for small-business owners. Today, if you haven’t heard of data analytics, Big Data, or data science, it’s safe to say that you’re probably not connected to the Internet. Or your TV. Or pretty much any form of media.
Big Data and data analytics are hot right now. But as we proved in another post, you don’t have to be a big business to get rewards from Big Data.One of the most pertinent ways to use data analytics is to monitor and improve the performance of your company website. This is where Google Analytics comes in.
What Is Data Analytics?
Before we get into Google Analytics, let’s have a quick review of data analytics. Data analytics is exactly what it sounds like: collecting, sorting, and analyzing data, with the goal of using it to gain insight into some area of business. Since this data can come from all kinds of sources, it does require a fair amount of processing to make it useable. As we’re not primarily interested in the ins and outs of analytics, though, we’ll skip the details and move on.
You’ve probably heard the term data-driven decisions (or data-driven insights). This basically means that decisions are being made because of information gained from data analytics. The advantage here is that actions are based on a better understanding of customers’ behavior rather than being based on intuition or guesswork.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is, as the name suggests, Google’s player in the improve-my-website game. There are lots of sites in this realm to choose from, but Google Analytics has three things going for it:
- It’s a trusted and respected brand.
- It’s easy enough to use that you don’t need a data science background to rock the results.
- There is a free extensive training program that introduces you to both data analytics and Google Analytics.
Oh, and for small businesses, I nearly forgot the very alluring fourth point in Google’s favor:
It’s free.
Given that 1) free is good; and 2) better website performance is good, giving Google Analytics a try is pretty much a no-lose situation. All you’ll invest initially is time. But what does Google Analytics actually do? That’s what we’ll discuss next week, when we dive into the features of Google Analytics in the Techsperts Talks blog. Join us!
