Google analytics and our mumpreneurs

Hi Ladies, thanks for another productive and enjoyable meeting and congratulations to a couple of our members:

• Firstly to Tracy from Elianna who, last Friday, fulfilled her long-held ambition of qualifying as a Dale Carnegie trainer. We look forward to hearing how it goes and hopefully being able to get a taster of the underlying principles at a workshop next year.
• Secondly to Naomi from Cook Clever who has secured a two-year contract with Manchester Metropolitan university which she will combine with running her cookery classes - busy girl!

Michelle Kay from Your Webstar then took us through the fundamentals of Google Analytics and how we can use the tool to help us engage users on our websites and measure how effective pages are at doing what we want them to do. I don't propose to go through all the points Michelle made but some of the key points were:

• Google Analytics (GA) is FREE to download and basically involes installing tracking code of every page of your website you want to analyse. You then receive regular reports which provide stats on how many people you are attracting to your site but, more importantly, how people are getting to and leaving it, how long they're staying on it and whether they're actually doing what you want them to do e.g. registering for a newsletter. This is relatively easy to do yourself, particularly if you have a content management system, or you can ask your web designer to do it for you. Michelle advised that if you're having a site built from scratch a good designer should built this in as a matter of course. If you have an existing site a rough estimate of price to install GA would be around £25 for a basic site.
• GA makes it easy to see which pages are working on your site and, as such, whether you need to change your marketing strategy, your website content or key words.
• You can set up goals on GA e.g. a set number of people per months to register for more information and then monitor your site's performance against these.
• You can identify words that are generating traffic to your site and then amend your content acordingly.
• By looking at the time people stay on certain pages or whether they exit your site from certain pages, you can use this data to determine which pages users are finding the most interesting and which ones are 'turning them off.'
• Getting your content right is key in terms of attracting and retaining users on key pages. This isn't rocket science but your content does need to be engaging and say what you need it to say otherwise your site simply won't work for you. To illustrate this point Eileen Coldrick from Virtual PA Services has kindly allowed us to see the 'before' and 'after' versions of  a couple of her website pages. Since Michelle helped her to re-write her content she's already seen a significant increase in traffic, even though the site isn't due to be finalised until later this week.

If any of you have any further questions regarding Google Analytics please contact Michelle direct.

Next weeks meeting

We're at Fina next week and our guest speaker will be Nicky Bates from P81 promotions and print