Do you think you are optimising your use of social media, website creation, and web content updates? Do you feel like your content is up to scratch and doing its job in bringing in website traffic? Well, how can you really know for sure? Without checking over the analytics of your site, you can’t truly know whether your content is working or not.
With the use of Google Analytics, you can find a wealth of information to help you better understand who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing there. This information can then highlight what is in need of change. But how do you use it? What is the information telling you and why does it matter? Let’s find out…
Sessions
It’s not enough to just know how many visitors are reaching your site, because this number could give false impressions – visitors to the site doesn’t mean that they actually engaged with it. What you need to know is how many people visited the site, stayed, and used it in some way. If the number is low, you know that your site is seriously lacking in something a visitor wants or needs. Google Analytics is great in giving these figures, and you can even adjust the time period that you wish to analyse.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rates show the amount of people who came to the site and instantly left again. This means that the person landed on a site page, but didn’t engage with it in any way before clicking off the site again. Google Analytics gives you this information so that you can know that something is making people find you, but what they find isn’t eye-catching, engaging, or worth their time.
If you have a high percentage of bounce rates on Google Analytics each month, you have a problem and need to make site changes right away.
Page Views
Page views on Google Analytics means the total number of views of the pages on your site (including repeated views). Again, if your page views during a monthly period are low, you will know that your content isn’t organically pulling people to the right pages. Your pages need to be rich in SEO (search engine optimisation) in order to get the best results from your website.
Mobile
In this day and age, a site can’t afford NOT to be mobile friendly. This means that your website should be able to work well on mobile, desktop and tablets. If not, this could be why you are losing visitors. Using Google Analytics, you can see what you audience is doing in regards to mobile, tablet and desktop.
Google Analytics will show you which device is bringing the most sessions, new users, bounce rates, longest session durations, and conversions. This insight will then let you know whether your mobile site needs work, or whether your audience prefers a certain device (etc).
Session Duration
You can use Google Analytics to find out how long people are on your site. This is vital information because if this number is consistently low month on month, that means people aren’t finding anything of use on your site. They are landing, but not converting or finding any relevant information to then. This means a site rewrite or remake will go a long way.
Goal Completions
Goal completions on Google Analytics are the total number of conversions. This is whether people are filling out forms, signing up, or clicking through to contact forms etc. When potential customers convert this way, you are getting their interest and hopefully their custom. Therefore, keeping an eye on goal completions will really help you to know if your site and its content is drawing your audience in enough.
Landing Pages
The landing pages are the pages that a visitor “lands on” when they click a link through to your site. The landing pages section on Google Analytics shows you which pages are doing a good job of bringing people to your site, and how people are then engaging with that page. It shows how many sessions that page has had, new users, bounce rates, session durations and conversions rates along with goal completions. This information is brilliant as it gives a real insight into what pages are bringing people in.
Demographic
Lastly, it can be really useful to know who is visiting your site and whether or not they are the people you actually intended to target. Your website’s target audience may be missing your content due to poor targeting, which would be the reason why your site gets so many bounce rates, too – the wrong people are landing and not wanting to go any further. Google Analytics will tell you the age and gender of your visitors, and you can then determine whether this is best for you.
There is plenty more information available to you on Google Analytics, these have been but a select few. When you are a skilled and expert user of Google Analytics, like we are at SEM Consultants, this information is easy to digest, analyse, and gain insight from. We use Google Analytics to ensure our clients are progressing in various ways and that we know what is working and what is not. Use Google Analytics today, in order to get the most out of your site and your business.