Data really is the most useful component of digital marketing. Without data, we have nothing to measure our budget, our campaigns, or even our marketing strategies on. One of the best tools out there for data utilization is Google Analytics for your website. Whether you’re a small business or a multinational company, measuring the number of users, sessions, bounce rate and more are super useful when devising strategies and finding areas for improvement. Best of all – it’s free!
Why should I use Google Analytics?
Are you making the best use out of your Google Analytics? Or did you just zone out after hearing ‘analytics?’ Have no fear, as we’re going to tell you why you should utilize your analytics today, if you’re not already doing so, and offer tips to improve your analysis of your own metrics. You don’t have to be super techy to understand Google Analytics, but there are some basics that are useful for everyone to know.
What does it measure?
Google Analytics monitors all sorts of data, from visitor numbers to locations, to the age and gender of the end-user. It will tell you:
- How many people are visiting your website
- What pages and actions they are interacting with
- How long they will spend reading those pages
- What might make them bounce off
- The device type they are using to view your website
- Where they found your website
Data doesn’t lie, so having access for Google Analytics is crucial for reporting purposes and feedback on website performance.
Build Your Audience
By diving down into the demographics of your audience, you could use this data to build personas for your organisation. The Audience reporting feature allows you to view demographics such as age, gender and location, but it also offers up a plethora of customer insights such as their interests, which are listed in Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments. From these interests, you could build personas for your services and products to enhance your market offering. That information is priceless!
Follow the Behaviour Funnel
Did you know you can see the way visitors funnel through your websites? This is called the Behaviour Funnel, and it’s such a useful asset. It describes where your visitors are landing (usually the main homepage but they may come from others) and where they eventually drop off (or complete an interaction, such as filling in a form). The green indicates where people land, which pages they funnel through to, and the red indicates drop offs or bouncers, if the content isn’t relevant to them.
Where are they coming from?
Are you interested in finding out where your visitors are coming from? Under the Acquisition tab, you can explore which advertising channels are working best for your company. You can even use this feature to shape your PPC strategy, as it allows you to think about where is best to invest the spend. Each type, Direct, Organic Search, Social and Referral can be further broken down into the specific channels e.g. Social can break down into Facebook, LinkedIn, and wherever else you have social channels.
Report, Report, Report
Depending on when your Analytics account was set up, the date range dialogue box is really useful as you can report on historical data and measure current benchmarks against previous data. It allows you to identify patterns based on previous traffic and see where there has been success in the past to provide insight and direction for the future.
Monitor Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave a webpage before taking an action, such as clicking a link or filling out a form. An excellent bounce rate lies between 26% to 40%, with 41% to 55% being average. Anything above 70% is disappointing, depending on the website’s purpose. Things that will reduce bounce rate include making your page more responsive, using more visuals and designing a better user experience e.g. think about accessibility.
Conclusion
We could spend all day discussing Google Analytics, but the best thing to do right now is go and look at your own account. That’s right, go and explore Google Analytics! It’s the best way to get to grips with the data, and to discover figures that could improve your business strategy in lots of different ways.