I think it’s pretty fair to say that your website is a vital cog in your digital marketing machine. In fact, most businesses rely on their websites to passively capture leads and complete direct sales. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that many businesses are investing heavily in understanding how this process works, and how to make it work even better.

Last week I passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ). In this post, I’m going to explain why having a decent understanding of Google Analytics should be one of your first steps towards this goal: turning more of your website visitors into customers.

The Google Analytics Individual Qualification isn’t just for specialist practitioners!

You don’t need to be a statistician to understand Google Analytics, nor do you need to be a web designer, developer, SEO/ PPC expert or the company’s ‘IT’ guy. All you need is a belief that analysing demonstrated visitor behaviour in a measured environment is worthwhile (plus the willingness to learn some new stuff).

Before I start sounding like a salesperson for Google, let me explain the 3 reasons why you should consider achieving the Google Analytics Individual Qualification:

• Analytics will help you to understand your users
• Studying for the Google Analytics IQ test will help you identify your conversion pathway
• It will help you prioritise your resources when it comes to testing and optimisation

Analytics will help you to understand your users

The first stage in all successful Conversion Rate Optimisation campaigns (turning more visitors into customers) is building an accurate and thorough understanding of your users. This means understanding their problems, needs, goals – and how they use your website to find solutions.

With Google Analytics, you are able to see how people are actually using your website. This is called ‘demonstrated behaviour’. Now granted – demonstrated behaviour doesn’t necessarily tell you why things are happening, but it does enable you to build an understanding of what people are doing!

Here are just a few of the things that you could learn about your users:

• Where are they located
• What time of day are they looking for solutions like yours
• How they are finding your website (Search, Social Media, some other advertising campaign)
• What content are they looking for
• How relevant or useful they find your content to be in relation to their problems, needs, and goals
• How they navigate around your site in search of specific solutions

Google Analytics IQ will help you identify your conversion pathway

Have you actually written down on paper the steps and stages on your website through which a visitor needs to progress in order to convert into a customer? I admit – this process requires some discipline and will inevitably involve some compromise and difficult decision making. Having said that, unless you formally identify your conversion pathway, you’re never going to be able to measure it and improve the number of visitors who successfully complete it.

As you progress through the Google Analytics IQ course work, you will see how easy it is to establish a conversion pathway and measure its performance. Google Analytics calls these ‘Conversion Funnels’ and uses them to show you areas in your website which are failing to propel people to the next stage in the process.

The Google Analytics IQ teaches you how to setup a conversion funnel, track visitor behaviour through the funnel, and identify areas for future testing.

This course will help you decide what to test

One of the biggest problems facing website owners who want to improve their conversion rate is knowing what to test. Instead of guessing what to test, the Google Analytics Individual Qualification will help you to see what to test and how to prioritise your resources accordingly.

One of the tools at your disposal to help with this is a feature called the $index. This setting enables you to put a value on each page in your conversion process. It gives you a way of valuing how important each page is in the accomplishment of your goals and the conversion funnel overall. If you don’t know about features like these, then you risk wasting time and money on pages in your site that won’t generate a high return on investment.

What to do now

Hopefully you can see that using analytics is a great way to understand your users, measure your conversion funnel, and decide what to test. The last thought I would like to leave you with is that sitting the Google Analytics Individual Qualification does not mean that you will instantly become an analytics ninja! What it will do however, is give you some better ideas about how to transform behavioural analysis into actionable insight. And that, will surely boost your business.

Let’s take action!