How to use Google Analytics to find out more about your customers

In today’s cutthroat battle to attract customers, knowing as much as possible about who they are and where they come from is undoubtedly one of the keys to remaining in business.

This has previously been the exclusive domain of expert marketing consultants and advertising gurus. However, thanks to a handy tool from Google, now everyone has a wealth of information at their fingertips about the people who’ve visited their website – including the proprietors of small self storage businesses.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an online tool which enables anyone who operates a website to measure its performance for free (there is also a ‘premium’ version available for a subscription fee which provides more detailed information, but this is beyond the needs of most users).

Anyone who registers can see information for up to 50 websites, so it doesn’t matter if you operate more than one.

How does Google Analytics work?

The service is able to track visitors to your website using something called a ‘page tag’ – a small piece of computer code which is added to each of your webpages. Very basically, this piece of code acts like a security camera which watches where each visitor goes on your website and what they click on, and then relays this information automatically back to the Google server.

What can you do with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics allows anyone who runs a self storage facility to do a huge number of things. They can see how many visitors their website has managed to attract over a time period of their choosing; how many of those visitors had accessed the website before; how long they stayed; which pages people looked at – and a huge range of other information besides.

The service enables anyone running a self storage facility to build up a profile of who the visitors to their website are and how they interact with it. It even provides information on the kind of technology they used, so you can find out if more people are visiting your website using mobile devices instead of desktops, and can modify its design accordingly.

As well as providing information about your website as a whole, all this data is also available for the individual webpages. This means you can see if certain pages seem to be much more effective at attracting traffic than others, and how well pages which advertise special offers are performing, for example.

All in all, Google Analytics is the perfect tool for enabling the modern self storage business to find out everything it needs to know about its customers and how to attract them.