We all spend a lot of time and money trying to get people to look at our websites but fail to take the time to track the success of these efforts. All the activities that are done to improve the website traffic, like social media, emailing, search engine optimization; need to be monitored in order to see which one had the best performance and generate the best results. Because you could be spending a lot of time in an area that is not generating enough traffic. Then, with this information you can make decisions towards the best option to better manage your valuable time.
Google Analytics is one of the top, most powerful tools out there for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website. It give you key insights that help drive the evolution of your site, it shows exactly how people are using it.
Here is a list of the important data that Google Analytics will give you:
- Where your visitors are coming from – very important if you’re targeting a specific audience.
- How your visitors found your website – this is very important for determining which of your efforts are paying off. It shows if visitors found your site directly, through a referral from another website (ex: Twitter, Facebook), or from search engines.
Web browsers used by your visitors – knowing which web browsers your visitors use allows you to know which browsers you should be focusing on.
What keywords were used by visitors in the search engines to get to your website – this is very crucial for SEO. Knowing which keywords people are searching for to get to your site determines if you are on the right track.
As we already said, GA is one of the most useful tools for your business, but it’s not exactly the simplest interface, so if you are starting to use it you need to know the most importants areas where you can find the information that you are looking for.
Let’s start with an overview of the most important areas on GA which you need to analyze to find the information:
A is for Acquisition: What brought visitors to your site?
Essentially show you what’s driving traffic to your website, telling you where your visitors coming from. Some examples of what kind of traffic you are getting are paid, referral, organic, and direct traffic. Also allow you to see more detailed information about each of those channels. For example, shows the keywords the visitors used to find the site if the traffic came from a search engine or which social network the traffic came from so that we can define which social platform is most effective for your business.
B is for Behavior: What did the visitors do once they got there?
The “behavior” area tells you what your visitors are engaging with. Once a website visitor arrives at your site, the Behavior section of Google Analytics allows us to see how they utilized the site. We can see how many pages the visitors viewed, which specific pages they viewed, and how long they stayed on the site. This valuable information helps us to understand if the content, flow, and navigation are being utilized the way we intended. Behavior also gives us key data about your website’s loading speed.
C is for Conversion: Did they do what you wanted them to do?
Possibly the most important information to get from Google Analytics, however, is conversions. A conversion occurs when a website visitor performs the operation that we set up that turns them from being a casual website visitor into a potential customer. Typically, this is when a visitor fills out the website’s contact form, completes the shopping cart checkout process, or clicks an email or phone link. From a marketing standpoint, the goal is for the website to get as many conversions as possible. Analytics allows us to visualize conversions as a raw number as well as on a percentage basis.
Google Analytics has a lot of tools to give you information about the traffic of your website and you need to know how to use it and where you can find this information in order to take advantage of the data that you found and get a very clear picture of your marketing efforts and how you can continually improve them. Check out articles, videos and whitepapers about it to improve your skills on this useful tool”
