As a marketer, do you know what’s driving leads/sales to your website? Are you getting more out of your website by optimizing it effectively for search engines? Or do you know how much traffic your site is getting? Today, many marketers struggle to measure and get meaningful data from their website.
Google analytics is a free site tracking tool that allows you to gather information on where customers are accessing your website from and how they interact with each page, in real time. Rather than guessing about what your website’s statistics are, you can sign up for a free account to monitor your progress and ratings. This allows marketers to monitor prospects and customers more closely, and build a plan around targeting them. Google analytics can identify the average time spent on your website, the percentage of visitors who are browsing for the first time, the traffic sources, time on your site and bounce rate to name a few.
A Google analytics account can be set up for anyone who has a website and would like an analysis of how their website is performing. We’ve outlined six ways to get started with Google Analytics and increase your website traffic.
1) Determine your traffic source– What traffic sources are driving visitors to your website? A traffic source determines where the traffic to your website is coming from. Traffic can come from search engines, other websites, paid ads, referrals or direct traffic (typing a URL). Utilize the Traffic Sources Overview section within Google analytics to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of your search, referral, direct and campaign traffic. This metric can help determine areas of your website that are most successful and which are not, and help you make decisions on where to focus your advertising and site-optimization efforts.
2) Determine your content sources– Content sources determine which pages are getting the most traffic once visitors get to your website. By using this information you can determine which content your visitors find most valuable and develop content more effectively based on your site visitors preferences and needs.
3) Determine your bounce rate– Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of initial visitors who enters and exists your website (“bounces”) and leaves after viewing only one page, rather than continuing to read on to other pages within your site. A high bounce rate may indicate that your website was not what the visitor was looking for. Generally a low bounce rate is associated with the percentage of satisfied visitors, who are able to get more relevant and useful information from your website. Remember, it’s better for your visitors to spend more time on your website rather than less. Understand your visitors and determine a benchmark bounce rate. By monitoring your bounce rate, you can determine which web pages are working effectively in order to engage your site visitors.
4) Determine time on site– Time on site is an indicator of what website traffic is qualified. If site visitors are not spending a lot of time on your website, it may appear that the visitors is not seeing what they are looking for. Based on time on site insights, consider making your website more user-friendly and/or more appealing so the visitor spends more time on your site.
5) Determine unique visitors– Unique visitors are the number of new people who visited your website in a given time period chosen by you. For example, if this number is 1,000 that means that 1,000 different people visits your site at least once in the time period you specified. If this number is low, your website may not be ranking high in search engines.
6) Determine your key words– What keywords are driving traffic? Key words are phrases that your site visitors searched to arrive to your website. We recommend that these key words be optimized in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Incorporate keywords into your website that prospects and customers are already using in organic search. If the keywords your visitors are using to find you business are not the ones you have optimized for, re-evaluate and re-visit your SEO strategy and optimize your keywords more effectively. Google analytics are becoming more detailed, and now provide marketers with a map feature which indicates where traffic is coming from geographically, highlighting the areas of the country and city which you should be targeting your marketing. From this feature, marketers can see how often their customers visit their website, the languages they speak, and where site visitors are coming from a desktop, tablet or mobile devise. The pages that are most popular with site visitors are shown by how many hits they have and on which page customers exited the website.
Website analytics are an important tool to measure the effectiveness of your website marketing efforts. Statistics that surround your website visitors and pages which are most popular are key to the growth and success of your business. Google analytics provides customized data that can be useful when developing your online marketing strategy, website and campaigns. Marketers can find popular keywords that can help improve their SEO strategy and provide higher leads to sales to their business. As a marketer, you should continuously customize your website for greater exposure, evaluate the traffic flow to your website, compare visitor figures, and improve your web page quality by using targeted keywords. Learn from your website traffic and give visitors the information they want.
Remember, the more visits your website has, the better ranking it will have with Google. Websites that have a strong ranking often trade links with other strong industry partners which help improve their search engine marketing (SEM) efforts. With Google analytics, you can get insight into the number of customer visits and create strong links to improve your SEM.
How are you measuring your website’s performance? Are you looking at Google analytics to determine how your website is performing and/or for targeted marketing promotions?
Sources:
5 Top Benefits of Using Google Analytics for Your Business – Shobha Atre
http://www.fulltraffic.net/blog/84842/5-top-benefits-of-using-google-analytics-for-your-business/
Understanding the Basics of Google Analytics – Lucas Clum
http://www.makewebworld.com/google-analytics-basics
The Benefits of Google Analytics – Sterling Kump
http://blog.boostability.com/understanding_google_analytics/
Five things you should know about Google Analytics – Scott Matteson
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/google-in-the-enterprise/five-things-you-should-know-about-google-analytics/1727
Benefits of Using Google Analytics – Sean Rasmussen
http://seanseo.com/google/benefits-of-using-google-analytics/
How Google Analytics Will Benefit Your Business – Blink Digital
http://www.blinkdigital.com.au/how-google-analytics-will-benefit-your-business/33/
The benefits of using Google Analytics for your business – Cocoonfxmedia
http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/Blog/the-benefits-of-using-google-analytics-for-your-business/
Understanding the Basics of Google Analytics for Internet Marketing – Guaranteed SEO
http://www.guaranteedseo.com/blog/google-analytics-internet-marketing/
The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics – Simply Business
http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/microsites/google-analytics-guide/
