Starting With Google Analytics
For your website to achieve the success it needs, it is essential that you utilize a comprehensive analytics tool such as Google Analytics. Analyzing the traffic of your site will assist you in gaining more understanding of the interaction between your audience and your content and enable you to view your site’s performance over time.
Google Analytics interface is filled with valuable insights and useful data. At first sight, however, the number of charts and tables are seemingly overwhelming.
Luckily, in this post we’ll take a look at some of the crucial analytics that you must monitor, explain the tactics you could use to analyze this data to gain insight of the engagement of your audience to your website, and also cover the ways you could utilize this data to improve your marketing strategies and your website.
Google Analytics in Detail
Google Analytics is a commonly used free tool that Google provides. Research shows that half of the websites that have analytics technology are currently using Google Analytics.
It functions by recording the data of a website and then presenting it in large tables, graphs and charts.
The Reports menu
Once you’re in your Google Analytics homepage interface, you can see the Reports menu on its left-hand side. It allows you to retrieve more in-depth reporting for specific areas as outlined below:
1. Real-time – You can view the interaction of your audience with your website in real-time. You can see their particular locations, the kind of content they’re viewing, and a lot more.
2. Audience – This helps you learn more about your audience. You can also view your visitor’s demographics, their engagement with your content, as well as the devices they chose to access your site with.
3. Acquisition – Discover the source of your traffic, the methods people are using to reach your site, and the performance of all traffic sources on your website.
4. Behavior – Find out how people navigate and behave on your site. You can access data on page views, the time spent on the website, bounce rates, and more.
5. Conversions – Allows you to track specific actions taken by your visitors and the effectiveness of your website to get people who can make those actions.
6. Search – This function can be used to find reports and assist in documentation quickly.
7. Customization – You can set up your custom reports, report dashboard, and a lot more.
8. Discover – Use this function to learn more about Google Analytics and its sets of tools.
9. Admin – You can log in to your Google Analytics account, change your settings, and a lot more.
Your Site’s Google Analytics Homepage Reports
On your homepage, you can view some of the detailed data you can get in the various sections of the Reports menu. Some of the information you should expect to see include:
1. Users – This section covers the number of new visitors.
2. Sessions – Find out the number of visits to your site. Since a single user can visit your website multiple times, the number of sessions will usually be equal to or more than that of users.
3. Bounce Rate – The number of visitors that have left your site without viewing a second page.
4. Session Duration – The time taken by an average visitor to stay on your site.
Additional Reports
When you browse down the homepage, you’ll discover more useful snapshots such as Traffic report, Audience reports and Behavior report.
– Traffic report – If you need an immediate picture of the source of your traffic, the Traffic report will assist you. As a result, this can be used to assist in developing your marketing strategy.
– Audience reports – Audience reports (three) can assist in developing your content strategy. Having knowledge where a large number of your audience stays will help you personalize and localize your blog articles. Information on when your site is visited by your audience will help you to come up with a better plan of when to post fresh content.
– Behavior report – This will let you know your top pages and provide you with a quick idea of well-performing content and which specific pages aren’t.
Bounce rates
If your site has high bounce rates, then you require to find the pages that are making people leave your site right away. These pages could be ranking with keywords that are not relevant to the actual content being displayed.
Also, the reader might be confused about where to visit next on your website once they’ve finished reading a certain article. After making changes to your page’s functionality, layout or content, track your bounce rates over time to check if they reduce.
Exit pages
Just like it’s crucial to monitor bounce rates, it’s equally as important to monitor exit page data. Although some pages like a “transaction complete” page will always have high bounce rates, other pages might have high exit numbers that you couldn’t expect.
You could compare these pages with different related types of pages that have low exit numbers to gain more understanding of the various factors of these “high exit” pages that require to be changed.
New vs Returning Visitors
It’s essential to understand the combination of new and returning visitors that are received by your website. Returning visitors are surely your loyal customers.
They provide you with an audience to whom you can advertise your products, services and content. To expand your business, however, you must be continually interacting with new people and attracting this traffic to your website.
If your site has low new visitor members, make sure to optimize your site’s SEO, to assist you to rank high in Google.
Regularly share your content on social media to reach a wider audience. Also, consider advertising to put the name of your business out there.
Conclusion
Google Analytics can be a very effective way to monitor your website’s performance. Once you gain an understanding of how Google Analytics works, the data can assist you in making informed decisions on how to optimize your site.
If you have any more online marketing concerns, HD Marketing is always ready to satisfy your needs.
Recent Comments