Using Google Analytics to help make important marketing and business decisions
by Angela Cromack
Google Analytics is a fantastic FREE tool for showing you everything you would need to know about your website: who’s viewing it, how many are viewing it, what they are looking at, how long they are looking at it and whether your advertising campaigns are working. But with so much information available at your fingertips it’s difficult to see what you should be looking at and how you can use it.
Below is my detailed guide that should help make things clearer. It shows the top reports you can get through Google Analytics and more importantly how they can provide insight that will help when making important business and marketing decisions.
Visitors Report
This report will show you visits to your website for any time period, by day, by month and by year. The report will normally be set to a 4 week period but you can customise the report to show any date range and even compare visits from different time periods by clicking on the date on the top left of the screen. Looking at the number of visits to your site is interesting in itself but what else can it show you?
Trends over time
Google Analytics Trends Over Time
Does visits to your website increase at certain months each year? By comparing traffic to your site year on year you can see what trends occur, showing what months are good months for your company and what months aren’t so good. Suggesting when you could advertise to boost sales.
This can also be interesting if your product is affected by seasonal changes, for instance DIY site traffic usually peaks around March and April. If your business is seasonal can you see the same seasonal affect on your website?
If you can, great – it shows that your site is reacting in the same way as your business. But what if your sales increase in January year on year yet traffic to your site doesn’t? It could be that your site isn’t performing as well as it could be during peak sale periods. Therefore you may need to look at boosting the performance of your site through Search Engine Optimisation, pay per click advertising, email marketing or traditional online advertising such as banner advertising. Also does the traffic to your site increase the same day or day after you send an email to your customers? If it doesn’t, then the email may not be effective enough. Perhaps try testing some different subject lines or view our blog on ‘killer email techniques’. However, be careful if your email database isn’t very big as it means the increase in traffic won’t be very big either.
Retention or Aquisition
The ‘new vs returning’ report within the visitor section of Analytics is a very good tool for showing whether visitors to your site have been there before. This is particularly useful if you have been doing a recruitment campaign as by viewing this report you can see if you have attracted more new visitors to your site. However it is also important to check trends over time. If in March you have been running a campaign to drive new traffic and it shows 60% increase of new visits – check your results for February too as you need to see if there has been an increase and if there hasn’t, perhaps the message wasn’t strong enough or your web address wasn’t prominent enough on the advertisement. You should also bear in mind any other activity that you are doing at this time – for instance, Google Adwords is a very effective way of driving traffic to your website and more importantly to specific pages to tell them exactly what you need to.
Google Analytics Map Overlay
If you have ever wondered if there’s a market for your business abroad or if you should open a shop in a new area then the Map Overlay is the first report you should look at. The report will show you how many visits you have had from a certain country or city helping you decide whether you should launch that new store.
Traffic Sources
The traffic sources reports are perhaps the most useful for measuring the success of your campaigns as it will show you the type of traffic coming to your site and Google splits the type of traffic into 4 mediums which are detailed below:
CPC: This is all the views that have come directly from a Google Adword advert, either via a search or the content network. However be aware that this will only work if your adwords and analytics accounts are linked!
Direct: This is all the views that have come directly from people typing in your URL through their browser; accessing the site via browser bookmarks, via links in an email or links in other documents such as Word, Excel or PDFs; therefore, an email that you send out should increase the level of direct traffic that you see for that time period.
Referral sites: This includes all sites that have a link to your website and that Google haven’t tracked as being part of a Google Adwords Advert, organically or from direct traffic. This is generally where you will see the results of online banner adverts as the sites on which they appear will come through as referral sites. But it is also useful for seeing who are sending traffic to your site, for instance if you are seeing some referral traffic from sites such as Facebook or Linked In and you don’t currently have pages set up for these sites maybe you should investigate where they are coming from, or look at creating them. And alternatively, if you do have a presence on these sites but they aren’t providing any click-throughs to your website then you probably need to look at your strategy again.
Organic: This includes anyone who has found your site through searching on Google or other search engines and haven’t clicked on a Google Adwords advert. Monitoring the amount of organic traffic you get to your site is particularly important when you launch new areas of your site or even launch a new website – as if the level of organic traffic has dropped it maybe time to look at optimising your website.
The traffic sources reports can give good indication of the type of traffic you receive but ultimately you are relying on Google Analytics to tag the type of traffic for you, so I would always recommend tagging any online advertising or email campaigns yourself with the URL Builder that way you can be sure the traffic you are seeing is from your own campaign – making everything more measurable.
Important Keywords
The traffic sources report will also show you which keywords have driven traffic to your site. This is particularly important if you are looking at optimising your site as this list of keywords show you exactly what people have been searching for when they visited – providing an understanding of what people search for when they reach your site.
Content Report
The Google Analytics Dashboard
The content report shows you details of how pages are performing in your site – the top content report details the most viewed pages and the top exit report shows you the top pages where people have exited your site.
You will often find that the homepage is the most viewed page of your site as this is usually the first place people are navigated to when searching for your company; however, if it is another page make sure you investigate why. For example, could it be that you have a PPC campaign or an online advertising campaign running that is landing people on a different page? Perhaps look at the report for that page according to medium (as detailed above) to see where the majority of the traffic is coming from.
This report will also show you the bounce rate for each page – but be warned a high bounce rate for a page isn’t always a bad thing. A bounce is classed as anyone that comes onto that page and doesn’t visit another, regardless of how long they have spent on it. So if one of your pages does have a high bounce rate, first consider whether you would expect them to go anywhere else, if you would then you need to look at whether the content on the page is driving them to your objective – bare in mind that a content heavy page would give them all the information they need – so why would they need to go anywhere else?
Navigation Summary
The navigation summary for each page is also a great tool for showing how people navigate from a particular page – including where they are coming from and where they are going. The report breaks down the percentage of entrances and exits of that page, along with the percentage of visits from the page they viewed before and the one they visited afterwards.
For instance if you have created a landing page for a particular campaign that cannot be accessed unless you click on an online banner or pay per click advert that links to it, does the navigation report support show about 90% or more entrances? If it doesn’t you may want to look at the pages they are viewing beforehand, as there may be a link in your site that you have forgotten about. Be aware though that there will always be a low number of previous pages showing on the report as the landing page you created, as this will be people that have landed on the page, then clicked on somewhere else and then clicked back to the original page.
Looking at this report for next pages is also useful for this type of campaign – did you want visitors to that page to go through and make a purchase or request a brochure? If you did and the landing page is doing its job then these landing pages should have the highest percentage of next pages. But even if the percentage of people going onto the next page is lower than you would expect – have a look at where else they are going – it could be that the campaign is still creating positive outcomes – just not the ones you expected!
All of the above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the information you can get from Google Analytics but I hope it has given you some ideas of what you can use it for and at least spur you to have a look at your account and start to get to grips with one of my favourite web tools.
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