Well, because Google Analytics (GA) is by far the best enterprise-class web analytics solution out there in the market which comes for FREE. As Google Analytics data comes in easy to use reports and formats with deep intelligence about each aspect of your website and online campaigns, you can understand and interpret it easily to implement site-wide changes at a faster rate.

There are few other good web analytics solutions in the market which would give you similar or even advanced data about your website and provide additional functionalities; but as they will cost you hundreds, even thousands of dollars upfront (and more each month for additional services and features); for a small business like yours, Google Analytics provides enough features than you would otherwise be able to use for your business, for free.

So if you are interested in learning where your website visitors come from, or want to know the top 10 keywords that drive traffic to your website, almost all kinds of website data is available in your GA reports.

After implementing the GA codes on your website, all you have to do is to log-in to your Google Analytics account after 24 hours and start reading and analyzing your data.   

If you know the basics of website design and how different website elements work together, with little imagination and marketing intelligence, you could understand and master the cause and effect relationship of each data element. For instance, if you know that the most important landing page of your website is your home page, and if you could find the keywords that drive traffic to your home page, you would like to expand and make them stronger on various page elements to drive more traffic from similar or related keyword phrases, reducing bounce rate for that page. 

Google Analytics Profiles, Filters and Segments 

However, before you start using the data for making any changes to your website, it would be wise to wait a few months to gather enough data on which you could make safer judgments.

If you want to share information with different people in your organization or if you want to analyze different sections of your website, GA allows you to create additional profiles for each user and section of your website. You can allow restricted access of GA data to different users within your organization depending upon their roles and responsibilities. You can email daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly reports in pdf, csv, xml and other popular formats to any email address. This is very important if you want to send customized reports to your seniors depending upon their requirements.

One important thing to remember is to remove non-marketing data from your GA reports by creating filters. Data such as your own visits to your website or visits from your staff and friends can spike your numbers. You obviously would like to know what your customers are doing on your website not what you or your friends do there. Setting up filters and segments can be challenging and should be done very cautiously. One small error can screw your entire data, so you must check and recheck filters before putting them, and if not sure leave them completely. Go to Google Conversion University for any help in setting up filters, segments or profiles. It would be better to learn than doing costly mistakes.

If you run an online shop, Google Analytics can be an indispensable tool to help improve your conversion rates. It will help you identify important metrics such as your average order value, product performance, transactions history, visits to purchase (number of visit before a purchase took place), and days to purchase (i.e. how many days it took to materialize a purchase). This data can be very crucial to the success of your online business and will help you improve your pages, products and the paths visitors take to buy your products and services. By identifying and removing obstacles, you would improve your form fulfillment rate, sales & profitability.

Business goals and objectives provide direction and important benchmarks. It would be better to establish separate goals for your website and your online campaigns. Google Analytics provides you the options to establish goals for your website and monitor your progress and performance over time. By identifying conversion points for your website and moving backwards to the origin of the visits, you can identify important steps a visitor is likely to take and then work on improving them to improve your conversions.

There is so much you could learn from your website data using Google Analytics that if used properly it can transform your business and profitability several times. Good luck!

Google Analytics Video (Time: 9 minutes)