Google Analytics, and Why You Should Be Using It
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So! You have a website, which means people can find you, your content, and your products online. This is great, but do you know how they’re finding you? Knowing exactly how your traffic is reaching your website is equally as important as what they’re doing when they get there.
Google Analytics is a free tool offered by tech giant Google. It’s a diverse and powerful utility that will help you to increase the effectiveness of your online presence as soon as you adopt it. No joke - this is a big one.
So, what is Google Analytics? In short, Google Analytics allows you to track relevant metrics associated with your website. These metrics are collected by placing a small snippet of code into your website’s templates. Each time a visitor lands on your web page, a cookie (a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while the user is browsing that website) is stored on their computer, allowing Google Analytics to track their movement throughout your website and others. These metrics include what pages they are visiting, how long they stay on each page, how they arrived at your site and from where, and basic demographical data.
Getting started is easy - simply create an account with Google analytics, have the tracking code embedded into your website (either by your development team, or on your own if you’re comfortable with the process) and you’ll begin to see concrete metrics trickle in as little as a few hours.
The amount of data may seem a little overwhelming at first and may deter you from adopting Google’s tools, but don’t lose heart. It’s important to review your analytics regularly to ensure your intended audience is finding you, and they’re getting to the right sections of your website. If your analytics data shows that your users are failing to reach this content, then there’s work to be done optimizing your site.
We’ve covered the top 6 things you should review to get started. If you’re planning to complete a large marketing campaign or a website rebuild, there is even more data you should be considering to ensure you’re measuring your marketing or rebuild efforts correctly, but for now lets start with the basics:
Traffic
Direct traffic illustrates the number of viewers who arrive at your site by typing your URL directly into their browser, or when a visitor uses a bookmark to reach your website. This is a strong indicator of how many people know your brand / website URL, and didn’t need to employ a search engine to reach you. Alternatively, organic traffic lists the visitors who arrive at your site from unpaid organic or natural search engine results. Finally, referral traffic are the visitors that arrive at your website using links sourced from other sites.
Bounce Rate
Not quite as fun as it sounds, the bounce rate measures the percentage of single-page visits, or in other words the visitors who leave your site from their point of entry without engaging or interacting with your site any further. A higher bounce rate typically suggests that your pages aren’t relevant to what your visitors are looking for, or are uninteresting/unattractive. You can lower this figure by designing better landing pages, and creating quality content that engages your visitors and draws them in. There are other contributing factors to a high bounce rate but we’ll review those in a later blog post.
Session
Sessions mark the duration of time that a user spends actively engaged with your website.
Visitors
New visitors are users who have never previously visited your website. If the cookies on a previous visitor’s computer have expired or been deleted, these users will also register as new visitors, so be conscious of this factor. Unique visitors are the number of individual users that visit your website over the course of a specific time period, and excludes duplicates of the same visitor.
Technology
This section will provide an overview of which browsers and version iterations are used to access your site (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, etc). The ‘Mobile’ section will also review traffic visiting specifically from a mobile device, which brand of device, and which version of the operating system they’re using. This information is particularly important to review, as it will outline how many of your users access the web on a mobile platform, and if you should invest in Responsive Design (by the way we always say you should invest in Responsive Design).
Behaviour Flow
Behaviour flow tracks the route of a user from their entry page to the point where they left your site, creating a map of the route they took across your pages and ultimately where that path ended. eCommerce websites often want to see users migrate all the way through to the payment page, and a high level of drop-offs before that point might mean investigating how to convert more users.
At the end of the day, facts - whether they’re good or not - about how your users are interacting with your website are useful and informative. If something is broken, Google Analytics may very well show you where it’s broken and how to fix it, figuratively speaking. This may be a matter of work that can be done on your own, such as adjusting keywords or creating a landing page, but you may also need to consider having your site analyzed by a team of digital marketing professionals if your traffic rates aren’t where you want or need them to be. Just remember, information is always valuable, and Google Analytics provides a lot of it, for free.
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