A massive part of what makes your campaigns successful, inbound or outbound, is the usage of insight tools that let you know how your outreach is performing. One such tool is Google Analytics. It is Google’s web analytics tool that keeps track of a number of things on your website.
Google Analytics is an essential tool for businesses, but it is underused by many. Either a business simply isn’t aware of the valuable insights it can offer, or they feel overwhelmed by it and aren’t able to glean the insights that it offers effectively.
What does Google Analytics do?
To start with, Google Analytics helps you keep track of traffic on your site. It is also essential in getting insights into user behavior on your website, from how they use it, to how long they stay on site, and what pages they mainly visit.
There are many aspects of digital marketing that you can track using analytics. For instance your ROI, blindly launching campaigns without monitoring their Return-On-Investment can hurt your business. When you monitor ads, you find out which ads have a more extensive reach and better response.
Benefits of using analytics
To mention a few, Google Analytics enables you to measure the performance of your campaigns. You can check for their collective performance or individual performance.
This allows you to double down on trends that are working in your favor and pivot away from messaging or outreach that isn’t performing its best.
Additionally, you can also track trends on your website. For example, you can find out what time of day has more visitors, otherwise known as “peak periods”. This can inform your ad placement, format and the time you publish new content. With analytics; you’ll even find out what website visitors are looking at on your site.
Furthermore, Google Analytics will also help you keep historical traffic trends which means you can study past patterns to optimize your existing campaigns.
To help you start making use of this tool today, we’ve outlined our nine metrics to look out for, what they mean, and why they matter.
Nine things to look at in Google Analytics
#1 Site content
Having a lot of traffic to your website is great but knowing what these visitors look at on your site is even better. Your website consists of several pages with different information, and it is, therefore, essential to know what information visitors are after.
Tracking your site’s content will help you gauge which web pages are performing and which ones need optimization. Measuring site content entails looking at which pages get the most visitors and also where your visitors spend the most time on your website. This can help you improve the quality of your content on weaker pages, ideally matching it to the content on pages that are performing best.
#2 Session duration
It is not enough for people to click on ads or visit your site if they don’t stay. The amount of time a website visitor spends on your site will tell you how useful and valuable your information is. If most people leave (or “bounce”) after barely a second, your site needs optimization.
The time on site of your consumers is indicative of a good website with helpful content.
People tend to lose interest very quickly if they’re not getting what they want. However, it is important to note that tracking time on site with analytics can be tricky. This is mainly because it’s hard to tell when a visitor opens a new tab.
#3 Bounce rate
Mentioned earlier, another key metric to track is the bounce rate. This is the number of visitors who leave your site without exploring your other pages. Now, bounce rate can be a tad confusing to track but generally, if your site has a 50% and below rate, then your site is okay. However, anything above that is indicative of a problem with your website, such as readability, design, formatting or UI.
Bounce rate helps you gauge if there are any setup or user experience problems. It can help you figure out which page needs optimization more than others.
#4 Traffic source
With Google Analytics, you can track where your traffic is coming from which in turn helps you boost your marketing efforts at the source. Google Analytics will automatically measure:
#5 Direct traffic
These are the users who already know your firm and will key in your URL to visit your site. A high volume of these types of visits indicates a very strong personal relationship with your visitors, as they knew exactly who they were searching for and how to find you.
#6 Social traffic
These are also referral users who find your URL from social sites, blogs or other websites, including your own. Having a lot of social traffic is an indication that your social media outreach is performing well, as it means you’re leveraging your social presence in the right way to boost organic traffic to your site.
#7 Search traffic
If users found you through Google search, then they’re your search traffic.
The primary importance of measuring traffic source is to help you know which marketing channels are working for your business. This enables you to optimize your strategy by focusing on the successful channels and minimizing efforts on the less effective outlets, such as PPC, affiliate marketing and ads on other platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram and other platforms.
#8 Visitors
This is your actual traffic. It’ll help you understand how popular your site is. Tracking the number of visitors to your site is more effective when done long term. In other words, monitoring whether your site gains or loses visitors over time will help you gauge its performance. With Google Analytics, this is easy as pie.
#9 Conversion rate
Traffic to your site is a good sign, but low conversion rates are alarming. Measuring conversion rate is like tracking the health of your site and your marketing efforts. If your site content is not getting people to convert, then you have a real issue.
The best part is that you track the conversion rate of each campaign meaning you get to know where to shift your focus and which campaign ships to abandon.
Conclusion
Without actionable insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns, your business is likely to stagnate or decline. Therefore, Google Analytics is fundamental as it helps to direct your attention to areas that are performing and those that aren’t.
