Why You Need to Install Google Analytics on Your Dispensary Website

Google Analytics for Your Dispensary Website: An Overview

At its very simplest, Google Analytics is a tool to help you understand the number of people who visit your website. It’s a standalone platform offered free of charge by Google, currently the world’s most-used search engine by a long shot.

It’s nice to know how many visitors your site receives, but Analytics goes deeper. While it doesn’t identify visitors by name or other personal identifiers, it tells you important pieces of data, like:

• Where users are located
• What device they’re using (ie., phone vs tablet)
• What times of day receive the most traffic
• What their traffic patterns are in terms of page views
• How long they spend on each page

The list goes on, and on, and on. In fact, the depth of Google Analytics may be the main reason people ignore it or fail to make good use of it, and that’s a shame. While there’s definitely a learning curve in terms of using its full range of features, you don’t need to dive deep to start learning valuable insights. And the very first one you need, of course, is: How many people currently visit my website? After that, it’s all about increasing and maximizing that traffic.

Unlock the Power of Google Analytics Tracking

Knowledge is power, it’s said. And that’s nowhere more true than when it comes to harnessing the insights Google Analytics can deliver. But that said, when you’re first getting started, it pays to focus on a few key areas so as not to get overwhelmed.
Here are four to start with:

• Unique Visitors: The number of people who visited your site at least once during a selected window of time
• Pageviews: The number of pages viewed within a selected window of time
• Organic Search Traffic: The number of people who found your site through a search on Google (or any other search engine)
• Other Channels: The number of people who found your site through other platforms and pages, such as Instagram, Google Ads, or other organic or paid channels

Once we establish a baseline in terms of how many people visit your site, the next step is establishing what brought them there. Was it the eye-catching (but legally compliant) images you uploaded to Instagram? The virtual event invitations you sent to your email list? What’s working? Where should you double down on your efforts, or explore new avenues of dispensary marketing?

Google Analytics is a crucial part of revenue attribution. If you want to know how well your digital advertising is working, you need to install it.

What About the Competition?

Once you begin to get a feel for what Google Analytics can do—and believe us, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface—a question will probably suggest itself: If I know how many pageviews my website gets, what about my competitor’s?

That’s one thing Google Analytics can’t do. But others can, and do. There are a number of analytic tools—both paid and free—that can give you a fairly good idea of what sort of traffic your competitors’ websites get. But be forewarned: Sometimes this information is useful, sometimes it’s just another rabbit hole to fall down. Our advice? Focus on the areas you have control over, like your website.

And once you get more comfortable with Google Analytics, you’ll have plenty to take control of. From tightening up pages where you tend to lose visitors to fine-tuning your digital ad buys by location and time and beyond, the wealth of actionable information Google Analytics can deliver is, frankly, kind of staggering.

Google Analytics Tech Support

In terms of setup, the most challenging aspect of using Analytics is probably installing it. Though Google shares step-by-step instructions, you’ll need someone with experience in website backends to install a tracking tag within the code for your dispensary website. And guess what? This is something we can totally do for you.

After that, it’s a matter of associating your website property with the Analytics dashboard and then diving into the reports.

Do you have questions about getting the very most out of your dispensary website and your digital marketing efforts? Reach out anytime.

We’d love to help.