Your Digital Storefront is the electronic representation of your business and the cornerstone of your brand, so it’s important to make a good first impression. It’s much like if you owned a retail property or office, people would take notice of your signage, window décor and the neighborhood your business is located in.
Equally important is understanding the behavior and habits of your consumer online.
One of the best ways to understand your consumer and manage your digital storefront is through Google Analytics. You can set up your own Google Analytics account fairly easily, but it’s important to make sure you place the Google Analytics Code snippet on your website.
See the graph below to find out how to get your Google Analytics code.
If you utilize a third party vendor to host and manage your business website, you may already have a Google Analytics account set up. If they didn’t yet set this up, you can request that they add it so you can start to accrue valuable data. Once it’s running, there are three important numbers you should look at: New Users, Sessions and Avg. Session Duration.
You can access these numbers under the Acquisitions tab on the left hand side of the screen. Here is what you’ll see:
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New Users: These will be new people who have made their way to your site for the first time in the last 30 days. Be it through directly typing in your url, finding you on a search engine, getting to you through social media, or maybe finding your link on another site, those stats will all be available through this free portal.
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Sessions: This will be the amount of times someone went to your website and spent time on it. Typically, this number will be higher than your users and that’s a good thing! It means people are coming back to your site to learn more about you and potentially make a purchase.
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Avg. Session Duration: This is how long someone spent on your website. The importance of this number will depend on what the purpose of your site or pages on your site are. If they are on a page to buy a specific product or service, they may be on the page for a shorter period of time. If they are shopping around and looking through products and services, they may spend more time on the page.
Keep these numbers in mind as you work to grow your digital storefront business and update your website. Note consumer reactions when you make updates to your site. Before you know it, you’ll be growing a strong web presence in no time. Trying to manage your digital storefront, Google Analytics and business can become overwhelming and frustrating.
