Why Every Website Needs Google Analytics

Every business website needs a way to track how well or poorly your website is doing to help reach your sales goals. The most popular and free tool for tracking your website stats is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics allows you to track your conversion rates, website visitors, user experience, and more. Your website analytics help you understand what can be improved on your website or even something that might be going wrong.

Most recently, I had a problem with my website that Google Analytics helped me uncover.

Install Analytics on your site. Here's why.

I use the MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin on my website to review my site’s activity. From a glance in your WordPress dashboard, it tells you how many sessions your site received, the average time spent on your site, and your bounce rate percentage.

But, one day out of the blue my numbers changed drastically.

My bounce rate went up 300%.

The average session time went down from 3 minutes to 49 secs.

The number of visits and page views increased by 200%.

Everything about these numbers looked weird. For example, how could my website traffic go up by 200% and drastically decrease the average session time? When before

Typically, my website only spikes in traffic when I have a social media post go viral or if I send an email newsletter with links back to my site.

I took a closer look at my traffic sources and noticed a lot of that traffic came from a spam website, bot-traffic.xyz.

So here's what I did.

From my research, SearchEngineJournal.com says;

“Referral spam can’t actually harm your site by triggering a fake visit (as long as you don’t click on the spam link).”

Although it doesn’t harm your site, it does corrupt your data which can prevent you from making informed decisions for your marketing campaigns and budget.

I used this same article which also shows you how to create a filter that would exclude this traffic from my Google Analytics reports.

Then I went over to Cloudflare to re-install the premium Cloudflare plan that includes the Web Application Firewall (WAF).

I had used Cloudflare’s pro plan to get the WAF feature a few years ago, but out of budgetary concerns I decided to get rid of it. However, had I known about this issue caused by bots, then I would’ve kept it.

Cloudflare is able to identify the bots and stop them before they come on your site.

Simply put, Cloudflare is like the security bouncer at the club that checks your purse or pats you down before you get in or on your website in this case.

Why Analytics Matter

The reason why any of this matters is because most businesses use their analytics to make decisions. Some of these decisions that are based on analytics are forecasting where to spend marketing dollars, decide what content is created, and develop marketing campaigns.

Clean data is everything when it comes to making meaningful and actionable conclusions based on it. That’s why making sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website and monitoring the activity is important.

Are you using Google Analytics on your WordPress site? Our Support Concierge WordPress Maintenance Plans include installing Google Analytics on your website and sends you monthly analytic reports.