Using Google Analytics for local businesses is an increasingly necessary practice for anyone who wants to highlight their brand on different digital channels and, of course, outperform the competition. With the right strategies and the right direction, it is possible to accomplish everything you planned and achieve satisfactory gains.
For those who have the challenge of managing a smaller company and with a more restricted performance, it is essential to know how to better invest the available resources to attract consumers.
With the digital transformation, this task has become easier and one of the ways is to use Google Analytics for local businesses.
It doesn’t matter the size of your company: to be successful, you need to rely on the help of some tools and solutions. Those who think that it is not necessary – or possible – to use technology to, for example, carry out more efficient Marketing actions, reduce time with operational activities or even make big gains, are mistaken.
Therefore, we have prepared this complete article on the assistance that one of the main Digital Marketing solutions can offer to your company.
Within our Google Analytics guide for local businesses, we’ll cover the following topics:
- What is the importance of using technology as an ally?
- What is the use of Google Analytics for local businesses?
- How to apply advanced filters?
- What are the best sources of insights for your business?
Are you curious and want to know more? Continue reading this article to answer all your questions on the subject!
What is the importance of using technology as an ally?
Did you know that studies show that 92% of consumers search for online information about local businesses that they are interested in? So, how to ignore these impactful numbers?
Taking care of the relevance and performance of your Digital Marketing strategies has, therefore, become essential to succeed in your market.
The important thing is to have the notion that your digital actions will directly reflect on the performance of your physical business.
In practice, the better your work on the main digital channels, the greater your chances of attracting more consumers and, as a consequence, closing more sales.
Therefore, do not stick to the size of your local business or the market in which you operate: use technology as an ally to facilitate your work.
With so many tools and solutions available on the market, it is vital to take advantage of these resources to, for example, optimize your time management, enhance your Marketing plan or attract more customers.
What is the use of Google Analytics for local businesses?
Google Analytics is an example of those resources that can be used to make the business even more successful. But before knowing how to fit the Google product to your company, it is important to understand the current scenario for local businesses when it comes to performance on the main channels and digital platforms.
It is no use relying on numbers of large companies and the market, in general, to assess the success or failure of their strategies when it comes to local business.
Want an example? According to a study by BrightLocal, a local business receives, on average, 414 unique visitors per month; 13% of the total receive less than 100 visits per month.
Another important indicator generated by the same report is related to the origin of visits made by users. On average, 50% of the traffic generated by local businesses comes from organic work.
That is, few sponsored links are used efficiently, as well as email marketing and social networks are left out.
The time spent on a page is also vital to identify whether what is being offered is, in fact, attractive to the users you want to approach.
According to BrightLocal, it takes about 96 seconds, on average, that each user spends on the pages of a local business with a bounce rate of around 60%.
This last data serves as a strong indication that most of the local businesses are not using digital channels efficiently. Therefore, it is essential to find ways to better target your campaigns and communication actions and, as a consequence, attract more potential consumers and close more sales.
How to apply advanced filters?
How about, then, knowing how to adjust your Google Analytics to track the traffic that comes directly from searches of your business locations?
To make this task easier for you, we have put together a step-by-step guide with what you need to do to better understand the behavior of the users that really matter to you. Check out!
Step 1: Open your Google Analytics account and select “Administrator” in the upper left corner of your screen.
2nd Step: With this tab open, select “Create view”, select “Website” and enter a name for this reporting view.
3rd Step: With the view created, it is time to apply the necessary filters for you to make an analysis based on local search traffic. Click on “filters” and select the “Add filter” button.
4th Step: Give the filter a name and select “Custom” within “Filter Type”.
5th Step: Check “Include” and select “City” or “Region” in the filter field.
6th Step: Write the regions or cities that you want to limit your analysis as follows: “Region1 | Region2 | Region3 | Region4”.
7th Step: Click on the check to see how the results would look with this filter based on the traffic of the last seven days.
Task completed! It’s not that difficult, right? Now just apply this filter according to your preferences and needs to be able to better analyze the ideal audience to increase sales and the results of your business.
What are the best sources of insights for your business?
You already know how to filter your reports, right? But how to take concrete actions from the analysis of these metrics?
After all, the indicators alone do not represent much and you need to know how to use Google Analytics for local businesses in a really effective way.
Therefore, we have separated some tips that can direct your attention to the most relevant points of this monitoring work and, of course, to achieve better results. Check out!
Focus on what’s important to you
It may seem unnecessary advice, but the various tools and technologies provide a variety of information on a single site and it is not always simple to separate the wheat from the chaff, right?
To prevent you from getting lost in the middle of so much data, the first step is to define what are the most important statistics to follow them closely and to be able to decipher what are the possible improvements.
The same BrightLocal survey we mentioned earlier shows that more than half of local businesses (54%) do not set goals to be achieved by the performance of their pages.
That is, they put some strategies into action and, in practice, are unable to find out whether the results have improved or worsened, for example.
The good news is that the Google tool itself allows greater control for those who want to monitor their goals closely.
But why is it so important to set these goals? The answer is simple: these are the indicators that will show whether the strategies adopted by your business are generating the expected results or not.
Keeping track of your conversion rate performance, for example, will help you understand which actions and pages are really important to attract more potential customers to your business.
Want an example? Data show that 34% of sessions on local business pages are done via mobile. With this general information, you can cross-check your company’s own indicators and better understand your persona’s behaviour.
Identifying that this is a trend within your target audience as well, it may be time to invest in a website with a responsive design, for example.
Use the most appropriate channels
Communication platforms are also increasingly diverse, however, this does not mean that you should invest the same time – and resources – in each one.
Not all of them can be effective when it comes to convincing your persona to visit your store or leaving your contact information. Making a sieve in relation to the channels that can be more efficient is, therefore, fundamental.
How to find that answer? Simple, Google Analytics itself shows where your traffic is coming from. And we are not only talking about the geographic work – which we solved in the previous topic -, but also about the platforms they came from.
If most of the accesses are via Google, you must set up a sponsored link strategy and ensure planning geared towards SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Are social networks also an important source of the traffic to your pages? Thinking of strategic actions for these channels, therefore, becomes another priority.
Of course, you shouldn’t neglect platforms and traffic sources, but you can’t do everything perfectly, especially when it comes to teams and small budgets. Better targeting your focus can be a differentiator.
Optimize your Google Analytics
When we think of Google Analytics for local businesses, the monitoring work is not so simple to put into practice. Stipulating filters as indicated above is a necessary step to make better use of this tool.
However, in addition to these restrictions, always look for actions that can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of Google’s solution for your business.
Especially for pages that do not receive many visitors, internal traffic – visits to the site made by people from your own company – ends up negatively influencing your metrics and indicators.
Access to answer a question or test a new post, it doesn’t matter, ends up being accounted for by Google Analytics and can generate traffic with no relevance for you to follow.
To avoid this, repeat the first three steps of the previous topic and create a new filter. Select “Predefined” and check the three options in the following order: “Exclude” + “traffic from IP addresses” + “which are equal to”. Enter the IP address of your company’s devices and you’re done.
Now, your Google Analytics will analyze the traffic that really matters for you to understand the behavior of those you want to conquer.
Monitor and organize all your actions
For those who want to know how to prioritize Marketing actions and be able to better invest their available resources, the most important step to be put into practice is the monitoring of their campaigns.
That way, you will, little by little, identify which are the most suitable ways to get, in fact, win customers for your local business.
The objective at this stage is precisely to understand how your actions work in practice and the impact they have on your consumers, which will mean whether a path works or not.
Creating a metrics dashboard, for example, will facilitate the visualization of what really matters for the growth of your business, in addition to enhancing the work of Digital Marketing within your company.
Potentializing the use of Google Analytics for local businesses is, therefore, an efficient way to increase your company’s chances of success.
As much as your niche is restricted or you are unable to serve a larger region than you already do, technology can always make your Marketing plan even more efficient.
Now that you know how Google Analytics can be useful to boost your local business, how about staying on top of other tips with the same goal?