cool features for your google site
I guess that you’ve read the previous post about building a website with google sites or you’ve already done it by yourself : congrats! Your new website is awesome and beautiful as much as google can provide customization tools. OK, with google sites your website is not that trendy but at least you look professional and that’s the aim. With your custom domain name for your website and your custom email address, you have the starting package of a modern businessman. Let’s see how to configure this custom email address and some cool features for your google site.
custom emails are cool
Yes, emails are not dead, yes, you should have a custom email address to look like a professional service provider. As mentioned in the previous article, you can use just your google account, a personal one and pay as little as 1$ per month. So you have your gmail account, something like yourname@gmail.com. That’s OK but it’s better to have something like contact@yourbusiness.com. You can easily ask google to add this alias for you. It’s super easy to configure email forwarding in google domains. It’s a little bit more tricky to configure the “send as” in your gmail account. Please have a look on the slides below for more details.
analytics dashboards are also cool
It’s great to have a website to showcase your skills or to inform your customers about your product. It’s better to know who is viewing your site. With the power of your google account, you can unlock precious knowledge. And again it’s free… I mean it’s free if you agree to sell your data to the guys who don’t want to be evil. Fair to me.
Google Analytics is a platform that helps you to “get customer insights”. It works by adding a small tracker in your website which will gather data about the viewers : date, browser, origin country. Another interesting info is about the traffic source: do your customers click on your link from social media, from google search or do they know the exact URL ? You can add the analytics tracker from any website, it’s not restricted to google sites.
It’s mainly a marketing platform, to measure the ROI of your marketing ads but it’s still interesting to see the number of views : from a mobile and from a laptop. The countries, day and time… Super easy to configure and to use so why not ?
quick tips and more to come
If you need a cool website for 1$ per month, maybe you’re in the process of building an empire. I mean you’re starting a new service or new products and you need to be visible on the Internet. To grow your business, you may need time and money. This is the purpose of this quick tutorial. You can configure your google website, custom DNS, email, analytics in one hour. It’s fast and cheap, it’s not quick and dirty, it’s clean, and google sites look professional. See the inspiring sites here https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/google-sites-examples
Another quick tip is to enable the search reports in google domains. You will have similar data to G Analytics but in a summary view. There is also in the same section a tool to measure your page speed. Other interesting information about optimization, for example it recommends the file format of your pictures to improve page loading.
I suggest also creating a custom weekly google search alert on your brand, just to know what the Internet is saying about you Google Alerts.
Don’t forget to search the current trends in your field. As mentioned before, with just one google account, you have access to so many resources. Go to google trends and check what the Internet is talking about right now : here.
Next time, we’ll see how to finish the setup of “get online with google”. Google search and google map visibility then we’ll dip a toe in the google Ads ocean. In the meantime, please have a look on the tutorial below and feel free to reach out to me by email or on linkedin, I'll be hapy to discuss your new project.
➡️ how to create a google site
Vladimir