I Have Never Checked My Analytics, Am I Missing All That Much?

If you are not checking your analytics, such as your Google Analytics or your Google Webmaster Tools, then yes, you are missing something, and no, you are not. The truth is that a website can get by quite well, and quite successfully by only checking your analytics twice per year.

Why You Need To Check Your Analytics

Let’s say that you are using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools because they are free and because they are rather popular. You need to check them twice per year to look for warnings.

These tools give you warnings if something is very wrong. There may be a portion of your website that the search engine is having trouble looking over, and you may be missing your “ads.txt” file, which may affect your affiliate earnings.

There is also something called the Google Search Console. This will give you indications as to direct errors that your website has. Let’s say that you go to your Google Analytics and it says you have a problem with your website, then you would check your Google Webmaster Tools and your Google Search Console to find and fix the problem.

Why Should You Check Your Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is not something you should check every day to learn about your SEO efforts because your SEO efforts are multilayered with very few indicators. For example, something you do today could affect your SEO tomorrow or in six months, and there is no way to know which, what or when each event had an effect.

You should check your Google Analytics if you are using affiliate advertising to market your website. You need to check your ads analytics with your Google Analytics and then try to learn more about your affiliate campaign and how you can make it better.

The same is true if you are running a big social media campaign. You need to use your Google Analytics to see how well your campaign is doing. Using Google Analytics in these cases is fine because you know the trigger events (e.g. a post on social media) and you know the time period it affects, which means you can look on your Google Analytics to see which posts helped draw the most attention.

Honing Your Sales Funnel

If it is your plan to create and maintain a sales funnel that takes people from one place all the way to a conversion (e.g. a sale or subscription), then your Google Analytics is going to become very important. In these cases, you can set up experiments and engage in a deep study of your web traffic. In such cases, it may be impossible to connect your conversion figures with your traffic behavior without some sort of analytic information.

Should You Check Your Google Analytics?

Yes, you should check them twice per year to look for problems with your website. You should also check them if you are able to influence traffic conditions in a manner other than using SEO. If you understand the triggers for behavior, such as people clicking your advert to reach your website, then your analytic information will come in useful.

However, if you are using Google Analytics to check the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, then you may be disappointed; with the possible exception of when you are speeding up your website because speeding up your website often has a quicker effect on your search engine ranking than most other SEO optimization methods.

Do you need help understanding your Google Analytics or are unsure how to use Google Search Console, contact us for expert advice.