Google Analytics is, by far, one of the most popular and yet, unfortunately, also the most underutilized digital analytics solution. This is primarily because most website owners do not understand the true capabilities of this tool. Once set-up properly, Google Analytics gathers relevant data about website visitors, giving marketers the chance to understand and target their audience in a better way.
In this article, we tell you about the 11 things that you should analyse in your Google Analytics Account to improve and optimize your website’s performance.
1. Source of Traffic
The first thing marketers must find out using Google Analytics is the source of their traffic. Is organic search the main contributor to their website’s traffic? Or, is most of the traffic direct? Measuring this metric gives marketers a chance to understand the efficacy of their online marketing campaigns and adjust budget by channel to enhance their campaign strategy.
2. Audience Location
It does not matter if you are a small business or a multinational corporation, understanding your audience’s location can help you reach your target audience in a better way. Businesses can use this metric to tweak their marketing strategy to include special or local-language content to better reach their customers.
3. Device Type
These days, most users use mobiles to access a website. Understanding how many users are using a desktop to browse their website and how many are using the mobile website allows businesses to analyse whether or not they must work on enhancing the mobile-friendliness of their website. If a large chunk of total users is using the mobile website, it is crucial to enhance the mobile experience to surpass or at least match the website experience.
4. Social Metrics
Today, social media is not just a place where people share their lives, but also a digital arena where businesses find potential customers. Thus, it is essential to understand which social media channels are performing well and delve deeper into platform-specific details. For instance, just knowing that your maximum number of customers are coming from Instagram isn’t enough. It is also important to understand how many of these potential customers are converting into real customers.
5. Page Bounce Rate
A bounce refers to a situation when a user opens a single page on the website and then exits the website, without triggering any further request to the server. Landing page bounce rates and site page bounce rates give businesses an idea of their website’s performance. If you have been registering a high page bounce rate, you either need to work on the mobile-friendliness of your website or improve the content and the recurrence of CTR buttons.
6. Google Ads
If you are running any pay per click campaigns, it is essential that you use Google Ads metrics, such as CTR and conversion rate, to understand the effectiveness of your campaign. Not every click will give you a conversion. By analysing various Google Ads metric, you can understand what is stopping conversions and what can you do to change the outcome.
7. Benchmarking
Google Analytics’ Benchmarking tool is used by business owners to conduct an analysis of their site’s performance with respect to the performance of other similar websites. This feature gives businesses an idea of where they stand with respect to the industry average. With Google Analytics, businesses can also do historical benchmarking. In simple words, businesses can use this feature of the GA tool to set expectations based on their past performance. Similarly, business owners can also do e-commerce benchmarking to study industry trends.
8. Demographics
Using the demographics feature, marketers and business owners can gather crucial data about the age, gender and interest of site visitors. The data collected can be used for persona building and better targeting potential clients.
9. Page Performance
Use Google Analytics, digital marketers can also analyse the performance of different website pages. Essential metrics, such as page views, bounce rate, exit rate and average time on the page give marketers an idea of what is working and what needs to be changed. These page metrics also give businesses an idea of which pages are contributing most to their goal conversions and thus, where to focus the most.
10. Real-Time
This is one of our favourite Google Analytics features. Using this feature, business owners can get a clear idea of what is currently happening on their website. Getting a real-time view of their website allows business owners to develop a better understanding of their website performance. It also allows them to gather crucial data, such as which pages are leading to maximum conversion? Which social media channels are getting the maximum traffic? Which services are potential customers exploring the most? And use this data to their best advantage.
11. Assisted Conversions
Not every marketing campaign you launch will get you leads or new clients. However, every campaign will certainly help you take your brand forward. The Assisted Conversions feature of Google Analytics allows marketers to study every user interaction on the website, except for the last and the final click. The assisted conversions feature is most helpful with developing an understanding of the efficacy of various channels in a multi-channel marketing approach.
Key Takeaway
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool that can help business owners gather crucial data, such as who’s coming to the website, from where they are coming, which device they are using and which pages they are visiting. The metrics discussed above give you just a small idea of what GA is actually capable of doing. So, start using GA to track data and improve the performance of your website, marketing campaigns and most importantly, business.
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