Google Analytics is an immense tool! While there’s a
plethora of analytics suites available out there, Google’s product remains the
most widely-used website statistics service – a clear favorite among almost
12.5 million websites and blogs out there, and is installed in 57% of the
10,000 most popular websites in the world!
And for good reason. It is extremely quick to set up and
access (a common feature of all Google products), extremely simple,
straightforward and easy to use, and a comprehensive, enterprise-class analytics
tool that puts a plethora of data at your disposal – from basic stuff such as
the number of new and returning visitors, to an in-depth look at your conversion
and on-page analytics, to name a few!
And one of the best things about it is the fact that it is
totally free to use!
Here is a list of 5 Google Analytics elements that you
should keep an eye on:
1. Number of visitors
One of the most simple pieces of data provided by Google
Analytics is an insight into the number of visitors that your website or blog
gets.
However you get the same bit of information from
Wordpress/blogger dashboard as well, so what exactly does Google Analytics
offer over these pre-installed services, you might wonder?
The answer is, a lot!
Google Analytics goes way beyond providing you with simple
visitor numbers; you can check your total number of visits, unique visitors,
new and returning visitors (plus percentage of new visits), pageviews and pageviews/visit,
and of course average visit duration. And this is just to name a few! All the
available information can be presented in graphical format and compared with any other piece of data available in
Google Analytics.
2. Conversions
Conversions or conversion rate refers to the number of
visitors on your blog that go on and actually undertake an action that you
intended for them to undertake, such as buy a product (aka. convert). For
instance if you have an ecommerce business or if you’re selling something
online, the percentage of visitors that make a purchase would determine your
conversion rate. For a membership-only website, the process of signing up would
determine the conversion rate. For instance if 5 out of every 100 people sign
up for a newsletter, it means that your conversion rate is at 5%. If 20 out of
every 40 people like your Facebook page, your conversion rate is at 50%.
Measuring your conversions is an important aspect of Google
Analytics. However it requires that you set up a ‘goal page’ on your website,
and that specific goals are enabled on the website. Whenever a visitor lands on
your goal page, and successfully finishes that goal (fulfills an objective,
such as the ones mentioned above), that equals one conversion for you.
A high conversion rate means that more people are
successfully doing what you wanted them to do on your website. A conversion
rate of 3-5% is usually considered to be very good, however it varies with
industry/niche.
Through the ‘funnels’ feature, you can even check where
exactly in the process are you losing your visitors before they convert
successfully, which allows you to rectify the issue and maximize conversions.
3. Bounce Rate
Another important metric when it comes to the well-being of
your website/blog, bounce rate refers to people who arrive on any given page of
your website, but leave without browsing any other page. Like conversions,
bounce rate too is displayed as a percentage of total visitors.
Having a high bounce rate means that people leave your
website right from the page that they landed on. Quite obviously, this is not a
good sign, and could be due to any of the following factors: uninteresting
content, outdated content, bad website
interface, broken links, poor website design, difficult navigation, or bad
pages.
What Google Analytics does is that it allows you to identify
pages that have a high bounce rate, and gives an insight into the problems that
might have gone unnoticed before.
While you can never expect to have a 0% bounce rate, depending
on the industry you work in, anything below 50% would be an acceptable figure,
with figures such as 20 or 30% considered to be exceptional.
You can use Google Analytics’ In-page Analytics tool to
determine which page might have a high bounce rate, and rectify any issues.
4. Sources of Traffic
Google Analytics also lets you track your sources of
traffic, and where you’re getting your visitors from. It shows this information
in graph as well as pie-chart forms. And the tool divides this information into
4 major sources – search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic and traffic
through campaigns.
And it doesn’t quite end there; for instance you can look at
the keywords that visitors used in order to get to your website through search
engines. This allows you to see whether your keyword strategy is working or
not, and how effective it really is. You can also view the sources of traffic
for the search traffic category (eg. Google search, image search, Bing search,
etc.).
The same applies to all other 3 sources; you can view the
sources of your referral traffic, including the visits you received from
different sources – including the number of visits as well as percentage. Detailed
stats for each source are also displayed – including data like average visitor
duration for a single source, pages/visit and the like.
5. Google AdWords Integration
Last but certainly not the least, Google Analytics integrates
with Google AdWords and your AdWords campaign as well. If you’re using Google
AdWords on your blog or website (which you should be), to monetize your online
efforts through ads, this feature will come in real handy.
Integrating your Analytics with your AdWords allows you to
monitor each and every individual aspect of the campaign. This includes
visitors from different sources (non-mobile, mobile, tablet) that visited your
website, as well as provides ecommerce statistics like revenue, total transactions,
average vale of transactions and the like. Clicks-related data can also be
measured here – including CTR, CPC, RPC and ROI, to name just a few.
There’s tons of other data at your disposal as well. What
all this means is that you essentially have tons of information to work with,
all of which gives you the power to optimize your ads and ad campaigns by
identifying traffic sources, geographies, browsers and of course, pages that
are the best and worst in terms of monetizing your blog.
Knowledge is power. Use this information to alter your
AdWords strategy to maximize the revenues from your advertisement campaign.
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ReplyDeleteIndeed true! There's no such thing as "perfect" there is always the so-called shortcomings. But these shortcomings can be diminished by keeping an eye on google analytics data, in order to increase business revenue.
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