Are You Addicted to Google Analytics?

Website owners and developers are constantly looking at their Google Analytics to measure their success. For some entrepreneurs it is essential to know what they are to determine if they are meeting their business goals.

Those goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Google Analytics' approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set.

Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.

There are some players in the modular housing industry that have so many visitors that they begin looking at just about every detail generated to find ways to stay engaged longer with the visitor. When this data becomes more intense and the number of visitors reaches into the thousands these businesses have entered the realm of Big Data.

Big Data is a term used to refer to data sets that are too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software to adequately deal with. Big Data in many cases offers greater statistical power.

But what good is all that to a local or even a regional modular home builder that builds 20-40 new homes a year? Does all that date from Google Analytics really mean that much? You should know if your website is getting enough traffic to support your continuing business. You should know some other basic stats and that is about it.

Website traffic dropping? Then it’s time to refresh it. Give it a new look. Or maybe your website traffic is generated by your postings on Facebook and the drop is do to you not posting anything in a month.

Those are important numbers to know.

Say your area is hit with a natural disaster. What should you do to let people know your company is there to build them a new modular home or maybe do repairs? One of the first things you should do is get on Facebook and tell everyone that you are available to help.

When you do that, go to Google Analytics and get a visitor report by week and month. Armed with those numbers you can track how many people are visiting your website now that the disaster has passed. If there lot more than usual, keep hitting Facebook with announcements linked to your website.

If the numbers are stagnant it could mean that your Facebook postings have not caught people’s attention and you should change the message.

Analytics are good for your business and having a working knowledge of them is essential.

However, over the last couple of years I’ve had many small modular home builders tell me in detail what their Google numbers are, where they rank and so much other useless information. I can’t help but wonder if they truly believe that amount of information is needed to run their business or are have they become addicted to all of that data.

Why a modular home builder that builds 20 new homes a year and doesn’t have any plans to expand really needs to review a hundred datapoints a day is beyond me.

For some builders and even modular factories that huge amount of data is essential to keep their business flowing properly. It can predict a lot of patterns in buying and website visits year after year and if one of those datapoints spikes or drops it could mean action is needed.

For those caught up in data and statistics overload there is help for you at GAA (Google Analytics Anonymous).