Welcome to Part 2 of Jet’s Favorite Freesources! If you aren’t up to date on our first release on MailChimp, make sure you check that out HERE and be sure to read the supplemental info in later posts on maximizing your email and email segmentation 101. Lot’s of great information, all of it free!

Today let’s learn a little about Google Analytics. For a brief overview, Google Analytics is a plugin that can be added to your website for free that tracks users across it. The scope of Analytics is impressive, as you can look at your website’s data from a really broad perspective as well as drill into minute details with ease.

Data analytics has become a crucial element in today’s business world, providing pet store owners with crucial information about their website and its visitors. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people are visiting your site, where they’re located, what devices they use, what pages they visit, how long they stay, and more? Wouldn’t that information help you learn about your audience and help with promoting your pet store to the right audiences? With that information, couldn’t you make changes to your marketing strategy and your website based on real data rather than subjective ideas? Maybe you already have all this data, and don’t know how to bend it to your use - if that’s the case, schedule a call with us!

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Google Analytics allows pet store owners to master the ability to keep track of their website activities in order to better understand their customers and make the necessary improvements.

Benefits of Using Google Analytics

First and foremost, Analytics can help you learn about your audience. It can also help you segment your audience and identify niche sub-audiences that you can target for specific campaigns.

With this tool, you can learn what source is driving traffic to your pet store’s website (either direct, organic, campaign, paid, etc.), the location they are accessing it from, and many other elements. The tool will also provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your site’s traffic rates, conversion, and bounce rates, sessions, number of transactions, including other data.

Analytics can also tell your about your audience’s demographics, their interests, whether they’ve been to your site before, and more. It can compare different time periods to track increases or decreases when you begin or end marketing campaigns.

A second great benefit of utilizing Analytics is that it can help you understand what visitors do on your site. If you dig into the data, you can tell which pages visitors gravitate towards and which ones make them leave the site. As a pet store owner, this can provide you with good data to make website changes to appeal to your audience.

Monitoring the behavior flow on your site can help you in maximizing the results of your email marketing campaign and allow to cater to the specific needs and requirements of your customers.

A few more quick benefits for using Analytics:

Google Analytics allows you to customize your website’s data/reports for improved accuracy. Using the tool you can view accurate data from certain locations, gender, and age segments. You can achieve this by creating filters at various levels.
You can also exclude your own traffic while visiting your site so as to get accurate information on real visitors.
Google Analytics allows you to create specific goals depending on your business requirements. You can either choose to create your own custom goals or use a template for revenue, engagement, acquisition, or inquiry. Using the tool, you can monitor how these goals are performing and then take the necessary action to complete the goals based on this feedback.
An example of these types of goals for pet stores would be tracking purchases, or subscription sign-ups, or event registrations, or so on.
When marketing your pet store, it’s important that you have measurable, trackable KPI’s, or key performance indicators. For some campaigns it might be site traffic, and for other businesses it might be conversions. Regardless, it’s important that you stay up to date on what’s happening - you can customize your site’s data/reports through Analytics and they can be sent periodically via automated emails to the desired email addresses.
Using this feature, you can set this frequency for specific periods of time and even make changes as you see fit. The tool basically ensures that real-time data/reports on your pet store’s marketing are sent to the intended people in a quick, timely manner.

Last but not least, Analytics is free to use and extremely easy to set up. Google offers a Google Analytics Certification class and exam where you can really learn deeply about whats on offer, but even as a novice there is a lot to be gained from just poking around your website’s data collection.

Conclusion

If you have a website and haven’t yet set up Google Analytics make sure you get that done right away. Without Google Analytics you’re not properly tracking the success of your pet store’s site. Once you get it set up, make it a point to monitor the activity at least once per month. Use the data to improve your pet store’s marketing strategy and grow your business.

At Pet Engine Marketing, we are certified Google Analytics experts. If you want to delegate some of these tracking, monitoring, and reporting tasks, we hope you’ll reach out to us!