Google Analytics is a free measurement tool that records information about your website. You can use it to see how many people are visiting your site and where they found it, alongside lots of other useful data. This can show you what it is that’s driving people to your website, and help you understand how to improve your website’s efficiency.
The more efficient your website, the more people are likely to become customers and buy from you. Not paying attention to your Google Analytics information can mean you miss out on crucial improvements that could make your website more efficient. So now’s the time to start learning the basics and increase your chance of turning more site visitors into customers.
Google Analytics can help you track where people are visiting your site from – it will tell you whether they have come from your social media pages, from a search engine or whether they typed your web address directly into their browser. This offers a very simple and effective way to find out which of your marketing tactics are driving the most site visits. That way you’ll be in a position to save time and money by focusing on the things that are working well, and stopping the marketing activity that isn’t working for you.
Once you’ve worked out how people are making their way to your site, Google Analytics also allows you to see data such as how many new visitors have been to your site, the average time spent on your site and how many pages people view per visit. You can also alter the date range to a more specific time period – for example, the last week, the last month or the last six months. This will help you work out if your website performance is improving, or if it needs some attention. There are three good questions to ask to get to the bottom of that…
By monitoring how many users are finding their way to your site you can understand how well your marketing is working. There are two main ways to get to grips with that…
The stats worth looking at to understand this are:
For example, you might notice an increase in users on a certain day, or to a certain page. Looking into this in more detail and finding what has led to this increase in visitors can help you to focus your efforts and generate greater results.
By understanding which pages on your site are most popular and which links and features people are engaging with, you’ll be in a better position to understand the needs of your site visitors, what they are interested in and how to appeal to them…
The stats worth looking at to understand this are:
This can help you understand which of your pages are in need of further work, and give you a good frame of reference for more in-depth monitoring of your site’s performance.
No matter how hard your marketing is working, your business won’t feel much benefit if the pages people are landing on aren’t engaging your visitors. You can judge the effectiveness of a page using Google Analytics in two main ways.
The stats worth looking at to understand this are:
For example, if you notice a product or information page that’s getting lots of visitors and high time on page, you may want to feature this product on your home page or begin promoting it more widely on social media channels. This could help to raise engagement, raise product and brand awareness and even drive higher sales. Conversely, if you have a page with a low number of users and a high bounce rate, you may want to think about whether the information on the page needs to be more relevant to the needs of your visitors, whether there are things you can do to help it feature higher in search results, and whether links and calls to action are prominent enough.
Once you become more confident with the basics of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to do a whole host of things including understanding how people use your site, setting performance goals and working out whether visitors are using a smartphone, a tablet or a computer to view your site.
These articles will help you use Google and its services to improve your website’s performance. Read these for more ideas:
Have you enjoyed this article? Share it with your colleagues on social media...
