Without proper analytics you have no way to know what is working and what is not. (Though many marketing agencies prefer to keep it this way!)

Google offers a range of free tools that allow you to see exactly what is happening in your business. They can even help measure how many visitors give you a call or visit you offline. (A little creepy for sure – but essential data for any marketer wanting to know how effective their advertising is.)

While it is easy to add analytics code to a website, it is a little more complex to configure it well. At the very least, you need to remove bots and spam traffic from your data to get accurate results. For really useful data though, you need to add and integrate Google’s Tag Manager.

This allows you to measure not just which pages people visit, but specific actions they take on each of those pages. This can include adding a product to a cart, clicking a phone number, filling in a form, watching a video, downloading a file, opening up Google Maps or a variety of other actions.

This information is invaluable, especially if you are using paid ads such as Adwords. It can help you identify exactly which marketing strategies are bringing you results and which are not. 

For example, one client found they were getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, but on investigation we could see that traffic was not making any sales. This allowed them to put their efforts in to those sources that were converting to customers.

Google also offers a free split testing platform, Google Optimize. This allows you to improve the conversions on you page by running AB or multivariate split tests. Testing is a must for optimising page content to increase sales.