5 Great Ways Google Analytics Can Help Startups

I understand that focusing on sales and subsequent business goals is what every startup gets busy with in the initial stages. That’s absolutely okay, but you should remember that your efforts might lead nowhere if you do not develop the right metrics and measurement tools for your business. Arriving at the appropriate measurement and metrics would effectively streamline your business decision making process, thereby enhancing the quality of business operations.

In short, you will never be able to nourish your baby unless you know whether it is getting the proper nutrition or not, and metrics gives you that knowledge. As Hiten Shah, co-founder of KISSmetrics rightly puts it- "Growing your business without tracking your marketing performance is like driving with both hands over your eyes".

Powerful tools like Google Analytics go a long way in providing the metrics you need, to ensure you have the proper resource allocations and setting investment priorities. Herein lays the requirement to leverage the right metrics so that it can be judged whether the desired result is achieved or not. Given all this, Google Analytics comes in very handy for startups and offers a range of valuable features. I know, you may be using it on a daily basis, but still there are some features that you may have missed.

Let’s check out how these features can empower your startup!

Creating your Own Dashboard

Once you decide upon your business objectives, you can conveniently arrive at the metrics you are looking for. Whether it is the source of website traffic or a report based on new and loyal customers, you can design your own customized dashboard in Google analytics and include only those metrics which you need and which have a certain value, so far as your business is concerned.

Experience the power of the Google analytics Dashboard gallery! There are over hundreds of separate reports that you can generate, each having its own data, views, filters and segments. So, you have loads of opportunities to find out whether your startup is heading in the right direction.

This is an example of one of the great dashboard created to monitor mobile organic traffic evolution.

Setting your Website Goals

To get started with Google Analytics effectively, you must first set up your goals, for example, how many registered and reached the "thank you" page?, or how many visited your locations page? And so on. Goal setting is an extremely easy process, consuming even less than a minute of your precious time. You require these goals to create your reports or follow your investment, which reveal the successful outcomes from website visits, in terms of leads, subscribers and sales.

Using the Google Analytics URL Builder Tool

As you launch your website for your startup, you need to identify sources of traffic and which link building activity generates the real value to your website. Hence it becomes very crucial to identify key topics and enhance your content. The URL Builder is a great tool which can effectively assist you to track your content marketing. Just go through certain simple steps, and you will be able to create customized URL for your page. This would in turn enable you to track the sources and keep a record of the conversion that take place.

Analyzing Outcomes of Social Media Efforts

As we all know, social media is the talk of the day and to be in the limelight, every business tries hard to make a mark over social networking platforms. But when you engage in social media activities, you need to carefully measure the outcome of your efforts. Using Google Analytics to track your social media activities will give you answers to questions like- Which social networking platforms are successful in helping you reach your target audience? Which platform is generating the maximum number of efforts for your business? Is your social media strategy working, and if so, then what are the areas where you are scoring high or low?

Create a custom segment in your analytics account and segregate social media traffic from Google analytics and you can even have social media traffic analysis per social media channel. Also, you can use the URL builder (we discussed earlier) to create specific links for specific social media channel so you can track traffic.

Tracking your Customer Journey

Google analytics gives you the provision to meticulously track your customer journey. For your business, stop looking at website visits and page views only and expand your Analysis to find the contents viewed and the page Engagement. Think about the customer acquisition cost not just cost per click (CPC), if you are looking for leads for your business, check Cost Per Lead (CPL). Finally, if you are selling products or services, then you need to check the cost per sales as well.

Using the proper Google Analytics tools will help you find out the consumer journey in your website and then you can enhance it and generate more leads.