All businesses want an online presence, but just having a website is no longer enough. To grow your presence, you need a constant stream of traffic flowing to the site. To make this happen, you need the power of a digital analytics tool– these are tools specifically designed to give you a treasure trove of valuable insights related to your website’s performance. Insights from Google Analytics can answer critical questions such as how much traffic your website has received over a period of time, which are the most engaging pages on your site, where is your traffic coming from, etc.
What is Google Analytics?
Found within the Google Marketing Platform, Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most-used free web analytics tool that enables website owners and marketers track, collect, measure and analyse important website dimensions and metrics across 4 areas: audience demographics, traffic source, audience engagement, and website performance. Google Analytics removes the need to rely on your gut feeling when it comes to figuring out the performance of your website. It gives you concrete, reliable data in numbers and charts which you can use to analyse and develop an improved marketing strategy around. To use GA, all you have to do is embed a little snippet of tracking code to all the pages of your website you want tracked.
In this article, we will look at 6 powerful metrics inside Google Analytics that can help you maximize your site’s performance.
- Real time insights – There is a lot of interaction happening on your website at any given moment. People are visiting pages, clicking links, leaving comments, and making purchases. As such, websites are an ever-evolving asset. Google analytics can help you monitor the activity on your site in real-time. With this, you can know how many visitors are on your site’s any specific page right now. You can also see which section or content of your site is garnering the most engagement. If you are a business that’s running a 24-hour promotion, with real-time insights you can see whether your promotion is driving enough traffic or is being ignored, and quickly make tweaks if needed.
- Page bounce rate– Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website straight from the landing page without browsing through the rest of your site. This metric helps you assess the quality of traffic your website is receiving. As a website owner, one of your goals must be to reduce the bounce rate. If you notice that your conversion rate is plummeting, a high bounce rate might be the culprit. You can use this metric to design an engaging website that leaves your users with a seamless experience that they wouldn’t want to click away from.
- Technology targeting data– More and more people have been using tablets and other mobile devices to browse the Internet. But, does it hold true for YOUR website? With Google Analytics, you can dissect the source of your traffic to see exactly how many users you are receiving from desktop, mobile and tablet. It will also give you an insight on the performance of your mobile traffic versus desktop traffic and tablet traffic by comparing them on various factors such as sessions received, goals completed and revenue generated. This information is extremely valuable to quantify the performance of different sources, rather than just tracking the volume of your visitors.
- Demographics and Interest– With GA, it’s easy to think of your website visitors in terms of numbers. But to really reach your conversion goals and to expand your brand, you have to connect with your audience. It starts by learning more about them, such as their demographics. Google analytics will give you a breakdown of your visitors in terms of ages and genders. And, GA will also analyze your visitors based on their online travel and shopping activities, and segment them into interest categories. This information can help keep your site’s content relevant to your audience.
- Pagespeed insights– Speed matters. Most users will not stay on the website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Your site speed is an extremely valuable performance metric that can boost or harm your website’s ranking. Google analytics monitors your site speed overtime for different browsers, pages, country and devices. If your site isn’t loading fast enough, your visitors won’t stick around, which will signal to Google that your site’s user experience isn’t up-to-par, which will negatively impact your search engine ranking.
- Acquisition report– Google Analytics’ Acquisition report gives you vital information about how you acquired your visitors, i.e. where did they come from? This will include data on the performance of your ads, keywords, search queries and other referring websites. Acquisition report essentially helps you learn your site’s biggest traffic drivers. If you are placing significant resources into various channels to bring traffic to your website, such as through partnerships, guest posting, influencer marketing, promotional ads, or upping your social media frequency, this is a fantastic tool to utilize to see if, and which one of, your efforts are really working.
Google Analytics tool is invaluable in learning about your user’s onsite behavior, and to learn some of the key stats underlying your website. Whether your business is tiny or big, if you have a website, you should get Google Analytics to track the current performance of your site, so you can learn insights that can help you optimize and maximize your performance.
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