Whether you have a brochure website, a blog or eCommerce site you need Google Analytics in order to understand how well your site is performing and how it can be improved to provide you with more interactions, sales and revenue.
If you don’t know what Google Analytics is, haven’t installed it on your website, or have installed it but never looked at your data, then Webfaced can help. While many businesses now review Google Analytics statistics as a standard business practice there are still websites that are not using Google Analytics (or any analytics, for that matter) to measure their traffic sources and user behaviour.
With Google Analytics it is possible to gather a huge amount of information that you can use to improve your website and your business as a whole. For example:
- How many people visit my website?
- Where do my visitors live?
- Do I need a mobile-friendly website?
- Which websites send traffic to my website?
- What marketing tactics drive the most traffic to my website?
- Which pages on my website are the most popular?
- Which pages on my website cause people to leave?
- How many visitors have I converted into leads or customers?
- Where did my converting visitors come from?
- How can I improve my website’s speed?
- What blog content do my visitors like the most?
There are many additional questions that Google Analytics can answer, but these are the ones that are most important for most website owners. Google has built into its platform a framework to help users understand analytics; the “ABCs” of Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.
Acquisition = How do you acquire users? How many? From where?
Behaviour = How do users behave on your site?
Conversion = Do users take a desired action on the site?
Google Analytics gathers information from each visit to your site and stores it in your online dashboard. Data is collected via a snippet of code that needs to be installed on every page of your website. The installation will depend on what type of website you have, however, we can take the pain out of the process and handle the full installation for you. We will also configure your account to setup some important reporting modules:
Goals
It is then important to setup “goals”, a setting in your website’s profile on Google Analytics. Goals will tell Google Analytics when something important has happened on your website. For example, if you have a website where you generate leads through a contact form, you will want to create a thank you page that visitors see once they have submitted their contact information. Or, if you have a website where you sell products, you will want to create a post-purchase confirmation page for visitors to see once they have completed a purchase. By telling Google Analytics about these “goal” pages the system can measure all visits to them and thus provide vital information on conversion rate (the number of people who buy something as a percentage of your total visitors) and all of the associated information about that user gathered throughout their journey through your site.
Site Search
If your website includes a search box to help users find content or products then another important element to build into your Google Analytics reporting that will give you valuable data is “Site Search”. This module will allow Google Analytics to track any searches made on your website so you can learn more about what your visitors are looking for on specific pages helping to highlight problems with navigation or specific user requirements. Site Search can also help you identify the wider needs of your audience as a whole; for example, are they searching for a product that you don’t stock?
Audience reports
These reports tell you everything you need to know about your visitors. We can setup detailed reports for your visitors’ age and gender, general interests, where they come from and what language they speak, how often they visit your website and the technology they use to view your website.
Acquisition reports
When you are carrying out various marketing and advertising campaigns then understanding where your website visitors come from is vital in understanding the effectiveness of your efforts. We can build reports which will tell you everything you want to know about what drove visitors to your website. You will see your traffic broken down by main categories and specific sources allowing you to see what campaigns are driving most traffic and most crucially, where your advertising / marketing budget is best spent.
Behaviour reports
Behaviour reports will tell you everything you need to know about your content and how well it is achieving its intended outcome. The three key areas are the most popular pages on your website, the top entry pages and the top exit pages.
If you set up Site Search, you will be able to see what terms are searched for and the pages on which the search is performed. This will likely show you information that users want to see in a particular location but which they could not find (hence their search). Alternatively it may show a desired next step which the user could not find a navigation element for.
