These days, everyone and their dog has a website to sell products, ideas or services (and yes I do mean dogs, see here!) so it’s important that you stay ahead of the game to ensure your business can thrive and grow.
If you run or work in a business that has a website or online presence, you’ve probably heard a lot of people talking about Google Analytics and how important it is for monitoring how your business and your website is performing online. But what exactly is Google Analytics, Why is it important? and What does everything mean?
Read on to find out more about analytics!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is, as the name suggests, a Google products that allows you to record, track and analyse all of the traffic coming through your website, blog or YouTube channel. This can give you a deeper understanding of the experience your would-be customers have when visiting your website.
Why is it important to track my Google Analytics?
No matter the industry you are in, Google Analytics can help you evaluate the full customer journey and find new ways drive results, so if you aren’t monitoring this traffic you are missing out on important data that can help you improve your business. The data collected in Google Analytics can give you valuable insights into the areas of your marketing strategy or website that are working and also ways that you can improve. These improvements could be anything from the focus of your marketing campaigns, content needed for your blog or how to improve your website user journey in order to increase engagement and encourage conversions.
Evaluating your Marketing Efforts
In order to see which of your marketing efforts are really working the best, you need to know which channels are driving traffic to your website. Google analytics allows you to see where your visitors are coming from as well as the content they looked at, how long they stayed for and what they were looking for (based on keywords or the link they clicked to reach your website).
Monitoring Your Website
From a technical point of view, analytics can be useful for determining wether your website is still working for your audience. Monitoring the bounce rate for your website on different browser types and devices (mobiles, desktops and tablets) can show you if you need to adjust your website for specific users so they get a better experience when they visit your website.
For example an unusually high bounce rate from users browsing on safari would indicate that there are some issues with your website on the safari browser that may need addressing for user experience. This would allow you to fine tune everything to get optimum results.
Using Analytics for SEO
Keywords are at the foundation of SEO. Google Analytics allows you to see the keywords that visitors are entering into search engines to get to your website. This is crucial for understanding if you are on the right track with your keyword and SEO strategy. In addition to keywords, you can also look at things such as loading time, session duration and bounce rate to determine user experience which is a factor that contributes to Google rankings.
What Does it all mean?
There’s a lot of data in Google Analytics and it can all get quite overwhelming if you don’t know what you are looking at. So here are a few of the terms used in Google Analytics explained.
Session
A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. A single session can consist of multiple page views, events, social interactions and e-commerce transactions.
Users
Users simply shows the number of unique visits to your website.
Average Session Duration
This shows how long, on average, users are spending on your website. Google doesn’t count for the time users spend viewing the last page during a session so the average session duration tends to be slightly lower than it actually is.
Average Pages per Visit
This gives an overview of the number of pages that people
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who enter the website and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site. Ideal bounce rates are low. A high bounce rate can show poor user experience, a lack of useful information or users who are misinformed when clicking onto your website.
Channel
This is the area of analytics that allows you to see which of your channels are brining in the most traffic to the website. From this you can see which areas of your marketing efforts are working and where you need to improve. Default channels are ‘Organic Search’, ‘Paid Search’, ‘Social’, and ‘Email’.
This is just a few of the main terms you may want to look at, there are a lot of different reports and statistics you can look at such as device type, age, location and you can even look at in page analytics to see which buttons are being clicked and how many times.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is vital to the digital marketing efforts of any business. The data contained can be used to drive forward and refine marketing strategies to help your company grow. We offer detailed, digestible and actionable analytics reports to our marketing clients that help them to reach new audiences, enhance their websites user experience and improve their businesses.
