Like any other aspect of your business, you need to understand how your website and marketing are performing. This will help you to understand whether or not you are getting a return on your marketing investment. At a high level, you can see if you are generating new business – but using analytics properly will allow you to see which marketing activities are bringing a return and which are not. Over time, the data that you get from analytics will help you to fine turn you marketing activities to continuously improve results.

It is very likely that you do. All hosting servers will have some level of statistics that are gathered with regard to website activity. However, this data tends to be very technical and not that easy to access and understand. Also, a very high percentage of websites will have Google Analytics installed – but some businesses do not have access to their own analytics or in some cases have access but do not use it.

It is not enough to just have analytics, it needs to be part of your management process. It is important to understand what metrics online are important to you, what targets you want to set and watching trends to see if you are achieving the targets.

Having analytics installed on your website is important, but really only of value if it is being used.

Yes. To add Google Analytics to your website, you simply create an account on Google Analytics. From the account you get a small piece of code that needs to be added to each page on the website. Most modern websites will either have settings where the code can be placed or will have a template where the code can be added once and will then appear across the entire site.

It should be noted, that adding analytics to the site is only the first step in the process. Once it is added, it is important to ensure that you are clear on what you want to measure. It might require setting up Goal or Event measurement in analytics to properly track the activities that you need to see.

Adding analytics code to the website is very simple and your web developer should really do this with any cost. It is a few minutes work to get setup. If your existing web supplier will not do it, we can set it up for you – but will charge €100+VAT for the setup. (Although the setup is simply, if we are working on a website from a different supplier, there is some setup work that we have to charge for).

If there are specific requirements around Goal Setup or Dashboard creation, these would need to be detailed and a quote can be provided.

In most cases, analytics setup is done as part of the setup of a Digital Marketing Campaign.

The basics are very simple really and as with many other things – the more you use it, the easier it gets. The biggest challenge that some people have is that there is a lot of data captured and it is very easy to get bogged down.

We would recommend getting familiar with the basics and being clear on which metrics are most important to you. Once you know that, it is very easy to pull that information regularly. As you get more familiar with it, you can begin to dig deeper.