In part one of this three part series, we looked at how to set up your Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics accounts. In part two, we looked at how to find useful information to monitor and strategise through the information that Google Webmaster tools offers you. In this final part of the series, we’ll take a look at some more in-depth info you can glean from your Analytics account.
Read Part One if you missed it >
Read Part Two if you missed it >
1. Logging in to Google Analytics and Basic Info
Log in to Google Analytics here, using the gmail address and password you or your developer used to set up the analytics account and then click on the name of your site to begin to delve into the wealth of information now available to you.
Basic info will be presented when you click in. This info related to the last month, you’ll see the dates for the data shown in the top right hand corner and you can click on this to adjust to give you information for different time periods as well as to compare one time frame to another.
Below, you’ll be shown the number of visits for this time period, the number of unique visitors, the number of pages on your site viewed, average number of pages viewed per visit, average duration of visits, the bounce rate and the percentage of new visitors. This offer a good overall idea of the traffic on your site, how relevant it is to visitors that find it and how deeply they’re engaging with your content.
2. Where are your website visitors?
It can be helpful to know where your website visitors are coming from. Perhaps you’ve been getting a lot of traffic from the UK or US but you don’t offer shipping of your products to these territories. If you’ve a high volume of traffic coming from there, this might be a good indicator that it will benefit your business to serve these countries better or make it more obvious that you ship to them. It also might indicate that it’s necessary to offer a local version of your site for these countries with content written in their language to help build trust in your brand or product and make what you’re selling clear and compelling.
On the right hand side, click on ‘Geo’ listed below ‘Audience’ and then select ‘Location’ to see how many visitors are coming to your site from which countries.
3. What are your visitors interested in?
Also under ‘Audience’ in your left hand sidebar is a section called ‘Visitor Flow’. This will show you the pages of your site that a visitor first landed on, and the pages they clicked through, on your website, after viewing the initial page they came across. This can give you a good idea of the information people are interested in or details they’re trying to find out. It might indicate that you need to make your contact details easier to find or that you need to simplify something like a shopping cart process if you’re running an ecommerce store.
4. Organic SEO
Organic SEO is a process whereby you use the words or phrases people will be typing into Google to find services or products like yours. For example, if you sell designer shoes for women, you’ll probably incorporate these words and variations of them in the text, images and videos etc. on your site. This use of relevant words helps Google to know what your website is about. To check what your site is appearing in search results for, click on ‘Acquisition’, select ‘Keywords’ and then click on ‘Organic’ to see how traffic is coming across your site in search engines like Google at the moment.
You’ll have accessed similar information within your Webmaster Tools account but as this data can vary between these two tools, it’s good to check up on both. Are your surprised at the words and phrases people are searching and arriving at your website for? Are they bringing in relevant traffic? If not, make a plan for how to incorporate more phrases and words into your site that will make it obvious, but not overly so, to Google what you provide or offer. If you use the same phrase too many times however, Google may decide you’re ‘spammy’, so keep changing it up.
5. Explore
Don’t be afraid to click in and out of the various other sections too. If you know your business well and want to understand more about your audience, you’ll have an idea of the sort of information, unique to your business, that will help you plan ahead better, increase traffic and increase sales or leads.
Analytics doesn’t control or manage any parts of your site, so you don’t have to be worried about impacting your website by clicking on the wrong things. Be curious, explore and find out what’s going to most benefit you.
Let us know what you find most useful about Google Analytics in the comments below. Did it help you generate more sales or encourage you to translate your website into the language of a top visiting country? Let us know more and good luck with your exploration!
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