This is part 2 of our series on Google Analytics. Click here for part 1.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what Google Analytics can do for you, it’s important to know what to look for when you’re going over your data. It can be difficult to make sense of all the information that you now have at your fingertips, so consider this a guide to navigating all that Google Analytics has to offer.
User Location
This lets you know where the users who are visiting your site are coming from and gives you a better idea of who you should be targeting. Google Analytics can help you identify where the user is located, so you can better focus your strategy, understand where you should be running ads, and get a better ROI.
Keywords
Keywords are an essential tool to ensure that you’re targeting the correct users and bringing them to your website effectively. They’re also vital for an effective SEO strategy. It’s important to understand the difference between organic keywords and paid keywords. Organic keywords are words that people have typed into Google and found you with, while paid keywords are words that you purposely utilize to increase website traffic.
Pageviews
Pageviews help you get a sense of how many people are visiting your page during a given period of time. To see how many views your page has, just go to Audience > Overview. This allows you to see if your site is gaining momentum, stagnate, or losing visitors.
It’s important to note the difference between pageviews, visits, and unique visitors. Whenever your website is viewed or refreshed, that counts as a “pageview”. A single browsing session is a “visit”, and “unique visitors” are the number of people who have visited your site over a select period of time.
Conversions
A conversion takes place when a user visits your website and actually follows through with the action that you want them to take. You can program certain events, like form submissions, downloads, or visits to a specific page as conversions. This is a great way to get an idea of how effective your user journey is.
Average Session Duration
Another tool that can help you to build a more enjoyable site journey for the user is the average session duration function. Naturally, if a user spends a lot of time on your site it bodes well for how effective it is. If they’re leaving quickly, you may want to look into what you can do to keep them around.
Look Out for Red Flags
Now that you know a bit more about what tools you should utilize while tracking Google Analytics, it’s time to learn about what red flags you should be on the lookout for. If users are visiting your site and leaving after only viewing one page, that indicates a high bounce rate. It may be time to make sure your site is user friendly and entices visitors to hang around for a while. The more time on your page, the better.
Of course, you need site visitors to have a substantial amount of data to track at all, and that won’t be the case if you don’t have many people visiting your site. Directing people to your page is vital so that you can attract as many potential customers as possible and know that your analytics represent a large sample size. Use all of your marketing assets as calls-to-action to your website.
SPARKS! has you covered! For more information about how we can make Google Analytics work for you, please contact SPARKS! Marketing Communications at 866-500-888 or visit https://www.onsparks.com/.
Check back soon for part 3 of our series on how Google Analytics can help take your website to the next level.
