Most businesses start their forays into the online arena in the same way. First you contract for custom website design that is sure to catch the eye of target consumer demographics. Next you seek out premium SEO services to optimize your pages and grow your online presence.

The next step is to hone your marketing strategy to encourage lead generation and increase sales. However, you definitely need to use tracking and analytics tools to measure your metrics and follow up on other efforts. Without proper analytics, you’ll never know how well your efforts are working, which efforts are working the best, and ultimately, how to improve.

Google Analytics is something of a gold standard when it comes to tracking pertinent data, especially since most of your marketing and SEO efforts are geared toward Google.However, you also need to know how to use the tools to your advantage. Here are just a few essential Google Analytics tips to improve your online sales.

1. Know Your Goals

Creating specific goals in Google Analytics allows businesses to track related data in order to better understand how their efforts are helping them to reach goals, or alternately, holding them back. From there you can track pertinent data to see how well you are working toward your objectives.

2. Consider Keyword Suggestions

The keyword game has become competitive, and many small businesses can’t necessarily afford to bid for top keywords. Yet, you still need to find ways to boost rankings for relevant searches if you want to continue to bring in business and improve sales.

Keyword suggestions can help you find adjacent keywords in order to target a specific audience that is seeking your goods and services.You can do this without having to spend major money competing for more generic keywords and phrases.

3. Set Up Conversion Funnels

Conversion funnels track the activities that lead consumers from clicking through on an ad or search results to completing a purchase (or not). Setting up these tools can help you to see how and why purchases happen, or alternately, where you fail.

4. Try Dummy URLs

Testing new ad campaigns or other efforts can be difficult when you have a lot of irons in the fire. A custom URL gives you the opportunity to track a specific effort directed only at that page.

5. Focus On Quality Referral Sites

Most businesses get traffic from a number of referral sites, and you need to know which ones are delivering top results. From there you can focus your efforts and increase targeted traffic and sales.