GOOGLE ANALYTICS FOR PLUMBERS

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that tells you everything you want to know about your visitors, such as:

• Their demographics such as age, race, gender, and location
• How your visitors found your website (social media, referral, etc.)
• Which browsers they use
• What keywords they used to find you
• If your site is mobile-friendly
• Number of page views
• Where they’re most likely to visit
• How many visitors become customers
• Which plumbing content on your site appeals to them the most

Google Analytics primarily tracks three essential things:

• Acquisition: How your website gets traffic
• Behavior: What potential plumbing customers do on your website
• Conversion: How your plumbing website gets users to complete a form, place a call, engage a chat prompt or take notable interactions across your site

Knowing this information opens up a whole world of new information about your plumbing visitors. For example, let’s say that your current plumbing website focuses on leaky pipes and valves and someone found that your article on leaky pipes generated the most traffic. You can capitalize on that information by creating more content geared towards all the different situations where leaky pipes arise and certain nuances it, thus improving customer retention and loyalty.

Knowing what keywords your visitors searched for is especially important. SEO is everything, and your plumbing website’s success often lives or dies due to how good you are at it. Crafting plumbing content specifically to address people’s needs is a surefire way to draw eyes (and potential customers) back to your domain over and over.

Most plumbing businesses want to get to know their target demographic as best as they can. Unfortunately for them, most people aren’t just filling out surveys for corporations. That’s why Google Analytics tracking is your best friend — it gathers all the information you could ever want about customers with little to no effort.

Using Google Analytics tracking is simple and easy, but still requires a bit of set-up. Start by creating a Google account. Then go to google.com/analytics and fill out the required information. Once that’s finished, click on “Get Tracking ID” to complete setting up your Google Analytics account.

Next, you must insert the tracking code onto every web page you want to track. The primary way of doing this is simply copying and pasting the code into your website’s template. Some web hosts have Google Analytics integration which will add the code automatically.

Plumb solutions is an expert in setting up and correctly installing Google Analytics for Plumbing websites. We’re also familiar with the many issues that plumbing businesses owners run into when they try to implement Google Analytics themselves or their current website provider/support service who’s core competency is not Google Analytics related.

Establish Your Plumbing Website Conversions

Next up, you’ll want to set up your plumbing related goals under your Google Analytics profile. Just click “Admin” on top of your Google Analytics and then click “Goals.” Then, click “New Goal,” “Custom,” and “Next Step.”

Here, you’ll decide which of your landing pages you want your ideal visitor to end up on. Ideally, you’ll want something that will change them from visitor to customer to meet your conversion goals.

Your conversion goals are up to you, but some common ones are:

• Purchasing from your site (if you sell related plumbing supplies or routine plumbing maintenance equipment)
• Signing up for your email list or newsletter
• Submitting a form on the website
• Clicking a specific button or link
• Generating leads for your business
• Engaging your website’s chat

Your ideal goals depend on what your plumbing business focuses on. For the majority of our plumbing business clients, phone calls and form fills are paramount. Please keep in mind most of the Google Analytics goals that we setup are manual and involve coding each and every conversion & testing in real-time to ensure the integrity of all the metrics we report to you on or that your custom conversion dashboard that we build relies on.

Google Analytics tracking gives you all sorts of information. But what can you do with this information, and how is it useful?

Start by going to the Google Analytics home. Here you’ll see data like:

• Users: How many people came to your site
• Session: What the visitor does at the site
• Session Duration: How long they stay on the site
• Bounce Rate: How many visitors leave without interacting
• Active Users: How many people are currently on the site

You can see the five kinds of reports on the left side of the screen:

• Real-Time Reports: Number of users online right now
• Audience Reports: Website traffic and demographics of visitors, such as age, race, location, and even browser
• Acquisition Reports: Where your users came from, including search engine, social media, or referral links
• Behavior Reports: Tells you what visitors are doing on your site and has information like page views, bounce rate, average time spent, and their exit and landing pages
• Conversion Reports: Measures your conversion rate based on whatever metrics you chose – downloads, subscriptions, and more

These Google Analytics reports provide valuable information about who’s visiting your website. You can use this knowledge to further improve your marketing and targeting strategy.

How Do Plumbers Track Conversions in Google Analytics?

Meeting your conversion goals is the main way of determining if your website is successful or not. If you set up your goals per our directions earlier, tracking conversions shouldn’t be a problem. Just click on “Goals,” and you can see all sorts of useful information, such as:

• How many conversions your website received
• Which URLs your visitors clicked
• The path your visitors took to convert

You can also find reports that break down Google Analytics data into handy information. For example, if you wanted to, you could break down the number of conversions made by people who live in Wisconsin. You could narrow it down in a myriad of other ways, too – what social media sites they came from, which landing pages made them convert, and so forth.

If you have multiple goals, you can use the drop-down menu to toggle between them.

For most plumbing business owners, Google Analytics data is nothing more than just a collection of words and numbers if you can’t find a way to maximize it. The primary strategy many plumbers use is to find out each page’s performance and optimize from there.

For example, let’s say you wanted to determine which page performs the best. You would click “Acquisition” and then “Search Console” and “Landing Pages” to find your landing pages. Then, organize your pages by goal count.

If you want to maximize your top or bottom-performing pages, you can try the following strategies:

• Use an SEO plugin to improve the page’s SEO score
• Compare the page’s keywords with other top-ranking keywords
• Change the keywords to match more popular alternatives
• Updating content to meet with current market demands
• Making the page more mobile-friendly

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make the most of what you’ve got.

Google Analytics works wonders on its own, but truly shines when paired with Google’s other tools.