Measuring your website performance is crucial in understanding your return on your marketing efforts. Google Analytics does a good job of doing just that.
If you haven’t already signed up or a google analytics account, you can do it here for FREE.
Google Analytics will show you metrics like your website traffic, the geography, time spent on your website as well as bounce rates.
If you already have google analytics set up and feel confused about where to start, don’t worry, you are not alone.
Google analytics is not the most user-friendly o most accurate analytics tool out there. But it provides great insights into the data and serves it purpose fo most business websites.
Many of our clients have enquired on how they can add google analytics to better use and improve the performance of their websites based on the data provided by google analytics. In this post, we will explain the same.
Before we proceed further, let’s look into what information google provides us through Google Analytics:
1. The volume of website visitors
2. Geography and time of user visits
3. The most visited pages on your website
4. The time spend on each page by the user
5. The percentage and number of people who have taken action on your website
6. The traffic source of the website visitors.
Now that you know that information you can gather from Google analytics, Lets ee how and where you can access this information in Google Analytics Dashboard of your website.
In the home dashboard, you can view
1. Traffic on your website in the last 7 days or 30 or 90days as or as per your custom setting for a period of time.
2. What time of the day or week these visitors came to your website
3. Live count of the visitors on the website at the current time.
4. You can view and classified traffic into
1. Organic
2. Direct
3. Social
4. Other
You can also know how many of your visitors are returning to your website. This helps you to understand the new and returning audience percentage.
Use the audience overview.
The section gives you insights like:
1.Pageviews
2.Average session per visitor
3.Bounce rate
In the demographic section you will get the following metrics:
1. Language
2. Country
3. The browser of the user
4. Screen resolution
5. Operating system etc
Using the demographics section, you can get insights into the age and gender of your audience on your website
Acquisition
This section gives you an idea on how your customers and website visitors came to your website and how they interact
You can set up goals in your google analytics account to understand if your website users are taking the actions and goals you have set.
Referral traffic also gives data bout the other websites sending traffic to your website which will enable to measure the performance of your SEO campaignsns,
Behaviors
Looking in the site content section in the Behaviors Tab lets you know the page you lost most of your visitors or where you go them the most entering your website. If you are getting a lot of traffic and losing it on a particular page, you might have to analyze why.
If you understand these basic and its potential, you know GA is one of the most important analytics tools in your digital marketing arsenal. With the right setup, you can analyze your return on your marketing investments with Google Analytics.