A huge advantage of Internet over other, traditional media is the potential to measure precisely how users use it. Of course proper tools are needed for that. The best of the free ones is Google Analytics. But how can it help you to run a language school? Read on!
Any data about viewers, listeners or readers of “old” media, is a more or less precise estimate. On the basis of research it is determined that at a given time approximately X million people watched the indicated television programme. Internet allows for second-precisions measurements of when a given user entered a website, what subpages she/he visited and after what time they moved on. You can even learn how such persons hit your page: did they enter the address directly in a search engine (they must have learnt about it somewhere; perhaps they saw leaflets of a newspaper ad?) or maybe they came to your website by searching for specific phrases in the engine or they were redirected from another website.
What does this knowledge give you? You can learn a lot about people who visit your school’s website, modify accordingly the offer and the performed marketing actions. That’s why we present below how to employ Google Analytics for effective work.
- Install Google Analytics correctly
This does not require any IT knowledge. Opening an account at the address: http://www.google.com/analytics/ is as simple as establishing a new mailbox. Then you have to install at your website the HTML code allowing Google Analytics servers to tracks the visitors.
If you use the popular WordPress platform, it suffices to install a plugin, e.g. Google Analytics for WordPress, and enter the Google Analytics account ID. Each user can cope with that. You can also embed the Google Analytics tracking code in the website’s code – if you don’t know the basic of HTML language, ask for help someone who knows more about IT.
- Collect data
To be able to analyse information you must collect some pieces of it. A month is an absolute minimum to collect any meaningful data about users’ behaviours. The longer you do it the more analyses you will be able to perform. It is very good if we already have data for full 12 months – this will let us see all seasonal fluctuations. Google Analytics will give us a hint, for example, when the time of search for language schools starts – in mid-August, late August, or as late as in September? Using this tool we do not have to make guesses – we see hard data.
- Checks statistics regularly and draw conclusions
Visiting the Google Analytics website once in month is definitely not frequent enough! The service is a really good too