Discover Where All your Visitors Come from and what they do
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google designed to show you what pages of your website are viewed by your website visitors. With this information you should have a clear picture on what pages are performing well and which pages are not. Website performance has become very important over recent years, and affects positioning on search engines, and how engaged visitors are with your business.
This post shall give you good tips to use Google Analytics effectively to improve your business.
Determine How Many Visitors your Site Receives
Google Analytics shows you how many visitors you receive. This can actually be determined in real time although for many businesses, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly is adequate. Google Analytics provides you with a breakdown of where in the world your visitors come from, and this can be drilled down to a local level which is handy if you operate a local business. And please… no more visible website visitor counters.
Identify Marketing Channels that Drive Visitors to your Site
It is extremely important that you can determine which of your digital marketing channels drive visitors to your site. Are people finding your business on search engines or Facebook? Is Twitter good for your business, or is email marketing improving your revenue streams? Knowing which channels perform give you clear business intelligence on where to invest your time and money.
Determine What Pages Perform
As well as traffic sources, to a certain extent you can see what pages your site visitors are interacting with on your website. Google Analytics shows you which pages are being viewed, how many times pages are viewed, the average time spent on a page, if visitors are new, if the visitor landed on the page or exited (bounce rate).
Although it should be noted that recent changes have seen Google Analytics record less data, (Google no longer shows page interactions from sites that feature a secure version of HTTP. I.e. HTTPS) it is still offers enough information to give the feature value.
Google also tells you if your visitors are using a mobile, tablet, or desktop to view your site. It even goes so far to show you what devices. This information can influence your marketing campaigns and your designs.
Track Ad Performance
Using Google Analytics it is very easy to glean the performance of your digital marketing ads. Google Analytics allows you to set up ‘Goals’ which for the most part can be done easily. With a little more knowledge this can be combined with ‘Events’ to give greater clarity on site performance.
Once again, determining which ads are performing helps considerably to maximise your return on investment (ROI).
Visitor Flow
Google has made it very easy to see what paths your visitors take through your site. Using ‘Visitor Flow’ you can see what pages your visitors gravitate too and what pages they begin and end their journeys. As this is a visual representation, you may find this easier to use than their standard reports.
Page Speed
Google Analytics can also tell you how long your pages are taking to load and why. Arguably, rectifying this is the job of a developer, but having this information to hand can help your developer sort out problems faster, or perhaps use less heavy images that may be slowing down the page.
Page speed is extremely important to ecommerce, as most of your visitors are probably using a mobile. Slower page loads will see more visitors giving up on your site and business.
I need Google Analytics what next?
Many website designers/developers install this service for you without even being instructed to, as this is always a good thing to have on your website, however this is not always the case. So if you website is not yet Google Analytics enabled, we can install it for you and provide you with any other services or website upgrades that you may require. Click here to get in touch with us to address any issues, concerns or planned upgrades for your website.