Google Analytics is very much like other research tools. Basically, it makes commercial sense to understand who is using your website. Key data on customers may be the following:
- How long they stay on your site?
- Do they abandon their visit?
- Do they come back?
- What can you do to make them stay?
- What can you do to get yourself up the search engines?
The analytics gives you great clues as to the behaviour of your customers on the site and help you make relevant changes to your pages and formats. This may be new and different wording, linking between key pages, improving the user journey, blogging, and some technical aspects.
The alternative is to sail along, assuming that your site is attracting traffic and that customers are visiting, when in actual fact they may not. A website has to be used and manipulated to work properly for you. It is a major tool in the armoury.
For long enough, marketing activity has been difficult to measure. This is no longer the case. Measurement and activity on sites are crucial to making them work for you.