Peter Drucker, the well-known Austrian-American management consultant, once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it!” Thankfully, we have Google Analytics to help us measure all the things. Maybe you’re seeing low conversion rates from leads but high pages per session — this means your leads are engaging with several content pieces on your site (great news), but something’s missing between that initial engagement and a sale.
But let’s back up a second. Whether they admit it or not, many tech and SaaS startups are simply overwhelmed with Google Analytics. There’s a deluge of data to explore — and when it comes to making crucial decisions, more data can mean more confusion about what really matters. You need to be able to "separate the wheat from the chaff," as they say. How exactly are the wheat and chaff separated — who knows? The point is, data is only valuable if we can distinguish between what’s relevant to your growth and what’s not.
Here are some resources to help you get set up with Google Analytics for startups and start optimizing your reports and data collection the right way.
HubSpot's Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics
As a HubSpot certified agency, we’re big fans of how HubSpot shares high-quality knowledge designed to help you succeed. Check out their “Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2021,” which covers everything from explaining what Google Analytics is and setting up GA for your brand, to how to use it and how to run some basic reports.
Neil Patel Makes Your Google Analytics Dashboard Awesome
When it comes to SEO know-how, Neil Patel is a guru. As the creator of Ubersuggest, a free platform designed to help with keyword and content topic research, he continually shares top-notch SEO knowledge. This article will help you optimize your Google Analytics dashboard, so you see the most important data first and create audience segmentation to identify where your visitors are coming from and which pages and content they’re engaging with the most.
Getting Started with Google Analytics
Looking for a great beginner’s guide to Google Analytics for startups or perhaps just a refresher? In addition to explaining what Google Analytics is, what it does, and why it’s needed, you can follow along for help setting up Google Analytics and connecting it to your site. As a bonus, the latter half of the article transitions into providing descriptions of all the reporting tabs and terminology you’ll come across so you can customize reports and find the data you need most.
Using Google Analytics to Guide SEO
What good is all this data without the ability to decipher it and make changes to your SEO strategy and content? Here’s a great resource for understanding your data, covering things like audience overview (locations, behavior, etc.), pageviews (which could help you identify places to add an exit-intent popup, for example), acquisition (hugely important for understanding WHERE your traffic is coming from — organic, social, direct), bounce rates, and more.
Step-By-Step Google Analytics How-To (+ Free Checklist)
Ready for a truly robust and detailed tutorial for all things Google Analytics? Search Engine Journal takes you through virtually every facet, such as setting up dashboards, tracking goals, understanding how to filter data properly, and even rounding it out with a 10-point Google Analytics health checklist. Bookmark this one and you’ll likely reference it frequently.
Use Data to Grow Your Traffic and Revenue
We hope these articles help you get started with Google Analytics or take your reporting to the next level. At First Page, we use Google Analytics to monitor our clients' site performance in real time, study their audience behavior and engagement, and improve content and SEO strategies. We used data and a growth marketing strategy to increase traffic and keywords by 400 percent (and revenue by 300 percent) in one year for this brand — we’d love to partner with you, hone in on the data that really matters, and help you grow.
