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Google Analytics is a tracking tool that allows you to analyse all of the data for your website in one place.
Once armed with this data, you can make smarter business decisions regarding your content, marketing, promotions, products, and more.
In this article, we are going to explain the ins and outs of this comprehensive tracking tool and show you how it can help you to make data-driven marketing decisions.
Contents
What Can Google Analytics Do And Why Is That Helpful To Me?
Setting And Monitoring Your Goals
Who Is Visiting My Website?
Studying My Bounce Rate
How Are Visitors Using My Website?
What Are People Searching For On My Website?
Is Social Media Attracting Customers To My Website?
Summary
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What Can Google Analytics Do And Why Is That Helpful To Me?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that shows you exactly how visitors are interacting with your site.
This includes the answers to questions such as:
- How did visitors find my website?
- What is their location?
- How long are they spending on each page of my website?
- Which pages of my site are they clicking on?
- How many people leave my website as soon as they arrive?
And so on.
Once you know the answers to these questions you can:
- Measure the success of marketing campaigns.
- See which content and topics visitors engage with the most.
- Understand aspects of your current plan that are ineffective.
- Build a strategy that is aimed at your target audience.
Whether you have an e-commerce site, a subscription site, or you’re a simple blogger, it’s always valuable to know how people are engaging with your content in order to improve.
Setting And Monitoring My Goals
Every page of your website needs to have a clear objective.
You need to decide what your objective is for each page.
It might be to introduce your brand, to sell a product, to get subscriptions, to inform people of events, or anything else.
If your page has no goal, then it is pointless.
Once you know your goal, you can use Google Analytics to figure out if you’re achieving what you set out to.
Let’s explain how to do this through some examples.
- If the goal of your homepage is to introduce and build confidence in your brand but your bounce rate for this page is extremely high, you can surmise that you are not succeeding with this goal.
- If the goal of your blog page is to get more subscribers but Google Analytics tells you that people stop reading your blog after the first paragraph, you can see that this is not conducive to achieving your goal.
In both of these situations you can use the data provided by Google Analytics to make changes to your website.
Perhaps your homepage needs a stronger introduction or maybe it loads too slowly. Perhaps your blogs are too long or not interesting to the audience that are visiting your site.
There are a multitude of reasons why a page might not be meeting your goal but once you have the data you can make changes and decisions based on it, rather than making blind guesses.
Who Is Visiting My Website?
OK, so Google Analytics can’t give you the names and email addresses of each person who visits your site, but it can tell you a lot of relevant information about them.
This includes: what country they come from, the language they use, their age, their gender, what device they are using, and their interests.
Knowing all of this information about your visitors is essential in planning targeted marketing strategies and ensuring you are attracting the right people to your site.
You can tailor social media content to reflect people’s interests.
Perhaps you want to do location-specific advertising.
You may want to alter how your website looks on different devices.
Studying My Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and leave without visiting another page on your website.
The lower the bounce rate the better.
Using Google Analytics you can see how those visitors accessed your page in the first place.
Perhaps the people you are pulling in from particular marketing strategies are not your target audience, so they aren’t interested in what you have to offer after they arrive at your site.
In this case, you’d need to look at new marketing strategies that are targeted more towards the clientele you want to reach.
Alternatively, your website may not have the look your visitors are after or perhaps your calls to action aren’t visible or intriguing enough.
If you feel that this is the case, you’ll want to look into how to optimise conversions on your website.
How Are Visitors Using My Website?
Have you ever wondered exactly how people are navigating your website?
Google Analytics can give you exact data on how visitors move from page to page and how they carry out your call to action, be that buying a product, booking an appointment, making a subscription, or whatever your goal is.
With this data you can see at which point potential customers are dropping off and make adjustments to tempt users to your end goal.
You can also see how converting customers are making their way to your call to action, which is useful as you can see which navigation routes are actually working and build on that.
What Are People Searching For On My Website?
If your website has an internal search tool, you can use Google Analytics to find out what terms visitors are typing into your search box.
With this information you’ll be able to see the pitfalls of your site’s navigation menus and update them to make certain areas of your site easier to find.
You may also discover that people are searching for something that you don’t cater for. This is an opportunity to add something to your website that you already know people are looking for.
Is Social Media Attracting Customers To My Website?
Social media platforms are a great way to drive traffic to your website.
No matter if you’re a small window cleaning business or a large soft drinks manufacturer, being active on social media is becoming essential.
But which platforms are working for you?
Google Analytics can show you exactly which platforms are sending visitors to your website.
More importantly, it can show you which platforms are sending you visitors that convert into customers.
Once you have this knowledge, you’ll be able to better manage the time or the budget you set aside for each platform.
If you can see that your conversion rate from visitors that came from Facebook is high, then this would be a good platform to invest time or money into.
Similarly, if Instagram is sending you traffic and also driving your bounce rate up, then you can make alterations to your Instagram campaign or redirect your time and money to a platform that performs better for you.
Summary
Google Analytics is a free web tool that gives you access to a range of data regarding how people interact with your website.
It’s useful for monitoring the things that are working for you and the things that aren’t.
It’s relatively simple to install and set up.
Once you start tracking your visitor’s interaction with your site, you’ll be able to create informed marketing decisions.
Data from Google Analytics can also be used to help you to optimise conversions on your website. For further assitance you can check our Cardiff Web Designer page.
