As a business owner, you may find Google Analytics scary at the first sight. But it’s important to have the information that allows you to make well-informed decisions about how to grow your business online. And Google Analytics is a tool that can help you collect data, track visitor actions, create goals, measure performance, track expectations, and generate reports that will provide a better visual rendering of what is happening throughout your site.
Being inquisitive about the traffic data is your religion. As a matter of fact, you want to know much more than just traffic data. Using the power of Google Analytics, not just you can grow your business and make smart decisions, but you can also get to know your audience and understand their journey better.
In this article, we will discover how Google Analytics can be used to improve the performance of your website, increase sales, or leads for your business and understand your customers better.
#1 Gain insight into the performance of your website
When you require basic information about website visitors, Google Analytics can be utilised as a quick reference. Discover how visitors engage with your website and learn more about pages that perform well as well as pages that fall short of expectations.
#2 Custom reports
Custom reports can be kept as shortcuts in your account for easy access and sharing with those who are responsible for tracking website marketing goals. Depending on how data needs to be viewed and/or compared, options are offered inside each report to allow the same data to be examined with several types of charts. Google Analytics even lets you view which sites your visitors are visiting in real-time, as well as how long they’ve been there, the length of their active session, and even a map that displays where each active visitor is.
When you need to get a clear picture of how your business is performing and functioning from the visitor/user/customer standpoint, then Google Analytics is a tool and single resource that will help you manage and view this wealth of information.
Let’s take a look at some of the questions that can be answered with website visitor data from Google Analytics |
- How are visitors finding your website?
- Are you creating effective content to get the results desired from your website?
- Are visitors doing what you expect once they arrive at your website?
- What percentage of visitors are completing a purchase or a goal?
- Do most of the conversions completed occur from first-time visitor traffic or return visitors?
- How many visitors are returning and how long do they stay on average compared to first-time visitors?
It’s been found that effective content leads to the desired behaviour! When investing a lot of time and money into a campaign, it’s important to be able to measure the results.
#3 Compare Traffic Data
Even if you aren’t actively marketing your business online, looking at traffic statistics can be very useful. Perhaps someone found a beneficial article or product on your site and shared the link on a prominent blog. You can see an increase in traffic from the supplied source by looking at visitor data in Google Analytics. With this information, you may wish to add a link to the page to make it easier for users to navigate to another related page on your website and achieve a conversion objective.
Learn how visitors interact once they arrive | Google Analytics makes it simple to see where visitors come from, how long they stay, which pages get the most traffic, which pages get the least traffic, which page visitors enter the site on, and which page visitors exit the site on.
View and compare traffic data | The date range selection has a function that allows you to compare traffic data from different time periods rapidly to assess progress and performance.
The better you understand your consumers’ journey as they interact and engage with information, the easier it will be to figure out what works and what doesn’t on various pages and sections of your site.
Create and follow a process analysis plan to make improvements when and where needed
Use the data to better understand visitor behaviour and actions, then make changes and track progress. Setting up shortcuts to different traffic data views might assist cut down on the tiresome process of searching through multiple view panels to find the data you’re looking for once you have a decent notion of what you’re looking for inside the data.
Measure | What is happening or not happening on your website.
Learn | Digest the data to learn more about how visitors are interacting.
Take Action | Increase font size, make updates to the contact form, create a new contact form, add a new button with call-to-action text, add a new image, show discount codes, change prices, add a new video.
What do you want to happen when visitors come to your website?
Think about how your website is designed to help potential customers or visitors to achieve a predefined action.
Examples of common predefined actions would be – make a purchase or use a form to submit a request for more information about the products or services offered by your company. Other common examples include downloading a PDF document or playing a video.
Using forms is the most common process of capturing internal opt-in leads online. Google Analytics will allow each form to be tracked as a separate goal, in nearly all cases this data could be useful to both eCommerce and Non-eCommerce websites. Configuring Goals does require additional setup, which is optional, but taking the time to set up goals can help capture data that is critical to your business.
Default Traffic Channels include Organic Search – Direct – Referral – Paid Ads – Display – Social – Email
- Organic Search refers to traffic acquired from traffic sources like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other major search engines.
- Direct refers to traffic that is acquired from someone typing in the website or page address directly, without searching at a search engine.
- Referral refers to traffic that is acquired from clicking a link on any other website.
- Paid Ads refers to traffic that comes from advertising above and below search results at Google.com using AdWords.
- Display refers to traffic that comes from advertising using the Ad Distribution Network from Google AdWords.
- Social refers to traffic that is acquired from any social network like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+.
- The email refers to visitors that find your website because of an email newsletter campaign.
How to Monitor Visitor’s Data?
How to find the best type of visitor data to monitor and create reports for | As we all know, each business is unique, thus the ideal reports to look at will vary depending on the type of business you have. If we take an eCommerce company as an example, we’d want to keep a careful check on sales and where our consumers come from. It’s often helpful to know what percentage of sales come from first-time visitors.
Aside from the income report, the conversion rate is frequently one of the most crucial figures that eCommerce businesses check when tracking website visitor statistics. The number of visitors that make a purchase divided by the total number of visitors is the eCommerce conversion rate. The conversion rate, on the other hand, does not always have to relate to eCommerce-based websites; it can also apply to a variety of custom objectives that can be set up in the admin part of your Google Analytics account.
You can find all report panels in Google Analytics nested under five (5) main category options:
Real-Time – Audience – Acquisition – Behavior – Conversions
Use Google Analytics’ Real |Time section to examine statistics about your website visitors and/or customers as they are actively watching and interacting with it. The Audience part is designed to assist website owners in learning more about their users, whilst the Acquisition portion is designed to reveal additional information about where website traffic originates. Report panels in the Behavior area contain in-depth information about specific web pages, site speed, and much more, including a graphic behaviour flow chart. Goals and Ecommerce conversions, as well as non-eCommerce conversions, are reported in the Conversions section.
Using Objective Flow | View Visitor Interactions, you can see how visitors engage with each other on their way to the end goal. Using the Goal Flow panel, create a visual representation of a series of steps and/or a combined collection of actions connected to any goal. Obtaining specifics on these types of objectives is usually kept for firms with special requirements. Viewing traffic statistics in an eCommerce Funnel, on the other hand, can be quite helpful in identifying potential issues. Changes that could be made to help convert more visitors into first-time buyers can also be discovered using Google Analytics. Then comes the delicate task of converting first-time clients into loyal customers!
Creating simple reports to track and monitor online objectives for your business and website
To keep a closer check on visitor behaviour, quickly export reports and build quick shortcuts to specific reports, then utilise this data to market your website, increase sales, and enhance conversions. Find out what’s being found and what’s not on the site and compare data from any date range or previous period. When building reports, keep in mind that Google Analytics can only begin tracking visitor data on the day the account was created and the tracking code was put to the site; historical data before that point is not available.
Reports will help to equip you with a better understanding of how different types of visitors or visitors from different channels are engaging with your website and content.
Summing-up
So, as we can see, Google Analytics is a powerful tool. The platform gives us the power to better understand our users and leverage the data in future website updates. When used in the right way we guarantee it’ll be a key ally for your successful marketing strategy.
GA not only provides you with extensive data on your online visitors but also pushes you in the right direction when it comes to website optimization.
By leveraging the knowledge, you just learned here you can set your online business for success, improve your SEO and make both search engines & humans happy! So why not start now?
If you need help to set up your Google Analytics account and manage it for you, please talk to us. Call our business solutions advisors today to learn about our digital marketing packages and how you can benefit from them.
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