We talk 6 key things Google Analytics can tell you about your website, and how you can use them to improve your digital presence and assess the effectiveness of your marketing.
It’s no secret that we love data! So it probably won’t surprise you to know that we love Google Analytics too.
In this blog we’re taking you through 6 key things Google Analytics can tell you about your website and why they’re useful, so you too can join us on the data nerd hype!
01. The volume of people visiting your website
It might sound a little basic, but a key way to measure the success of your website is by keeping track of the number of people visiting it.
Google Analytics can also tell you how many of these visitors are returning, and how many are new users. which is really helpful for understanding your audience and tracking changes in user behaviour.
02. How people are finding your site
The data that Google Analytics gives you about how people are finding your website is broken down into eight default channels:
- Organic – indicates visits to the website through any unpaid searches
- Referral – is what it sounds like! These are cases where users have clicked a link from another site which has referred them to yours, excluding major search engines
- Social – traffic directed to your website through links on social media channels
- Direct – visitors that reached your website directly, usually by typing the URL into their browser. However, Google also adds all unknown sources to this category.
- Email – traffic coming from clicking links sent in an email
- Display – indicates traffic from display advertising, e.g. Google AdWords campaigns
- Generic paid search – results generated from a generic paid search
- Other – any traffic that doesn’t fit into any of the above categories
This data is great for tailoring your marketing efforts. So if a channel is directing a lot of traffic to your website you can take a look at why that might be, and try to replicate what it is that’s working. It’s important to note that this is an ongoing process too, so keep testing and trying new things.
03. Which pages of your website are being viewed the most
Google Analytics shows you which pages of your website are the most popular (and therefore what your audience is interested in). You can use this information to streamline the user journey (i.e. how a person uses your website) to your important pages.
If an essential page on your site isn’t being viewed as often as you’d like, you could focus on the content and SEO (search engine optimisation) for that page, or reconsider the design of your website so the page can be found more easily.
04. How long people spend on your website
The amount of time people spend on your website can tell you a lot about their user experience. Whilst the length of time users spend on a page could have various motives, you might be able to identify some patterns in behaviour in order to make positive changes to your site’s content or design.
For example, if a lot of users are spending a very long time on one page, it might mean the page is difficult to understand. The context is really important here though – if it’s a long blog post people are spending a long time on, they might be enjoying reading it!
Alternatively, if people are navigating away from a page quickly it might not be grabbing their attention or meeting their needs in the right way.
05. Where people are visiting your website from
We think Google Analytics location data is super interesting! It tracks where users are visiting your site from, from the country down to the city, which can be especially useful in checking your website is reaching your intended audience.
For instance, if your business only operates in the Midlands, you would probably strive to have most of your website traffic visiting from this area as they are more likely to be potential leads.
06. Data comparison
This is the last one of our favourite functions of analytics – data comparison. Because how do you know if your marketing and website efforts are going well if you have nothing to compare the data to? Well, you don’t…
If you’ve ever looked at the Google Analytics interface you might not know where to start with sharing your insights with others, but this is where Data Studio comes in. Essentially, Data Studio is a function within Analytics that allows you to pull your data through and display it in graphs and tables, making it easier to compare and understand what your data means.
And that’s just the start…
There are so many helpful insights that Google Analytics can give you that we don’t have time to talk about them all now. But if you’re interested in finding out more about how your website is performing, and how you can use analytics data to make it better, get in touch with us for a chat.