If you run a , chances are you’re using Google to monitor metrics (if not, you should be!)
Google is a very powerful for your business, yet most don’t use it to its full potential.
It’s important to understand how many people are visiting your site and how they behave when visiting. This allows you to track the ROI of your online marketing, quality of , , underperforming pages, and so much more.
In this guide, you will learn six to improve your and increase conversions. This will give you basic knowledge to gather and interpret your , by creating reports on website and .
If you have just started your ‘s on the Google and don’t understand what the metrics mean or what to include in your – then read on because this is the blog for you!
What to Include in Your Website Reports
Google Analytics doesn’t need to be overwhelming. In fact, it should be more enlightening than anything else.
It gives you a big picture of the important stuff’s data like site traffic, engagement, and conversions broken down by source.
Visitors
The (the number of visitors you get on your ) is crucial to understanding the size of your audience.
Although a like from visitors will not be able to give specific information about your efforts, it will provide your with a good overview of the overall health of your .
With this , you can see any changes in growth; stagnation or decline becomes easy to identify, allowing you to make improvements quickly and easily.
There are two types of visitors that your gets: new visitors and returning visitors.
New Visitors
New visitors (aka unique visitors) are the number of new people who have visited your within a set period of time.
A is a good indicator of the success of your marketing efforts, both online and offline.
Say you want to monitor how successful your marketing campaign has been at driving new visitors to your web page. Take a look at the to see if there has been an increase of from unique visitors in that time.
Returning Visitors
Returning visitors are anyone that has previously visited your and returned.
They are the jackpot for your business and what you should aim for in your marketing campaigns.
A returning shows that the is interested enough in what you offer to revisit your site. Every time a returns, you have a higher chance of converting them into a customer.
Now that you know about the different types of visitors, you may be asking yourself, ‘how many visitors should my site be getting?’
The short and uncomplicated answer is- it’s relative.
If you have an e-commerce , you should be getting much more than if you had a for your plumbing business. The quality of leads will also be different.
If you have a new site or are new to , collect at least three months of before you start to truly analyze trends.
After enough time has passed to get reliable , you can start using it to understand how your efforts affect your .
With returning visitors, the general rule of thumb is to have at least 25% (ideally 50%) of your visitors returning.
Average Time on Site
Average time spent on your site is a good indicator of how engaging your is.
A high amount of time spent on your indicates high engagement.
Average time spent is also an excellent to measure navigation. If a finds it difficult to get around your , regardless of the they use, chances are they will leave pretty quickly.
If your is engaging and easily navigable , your will show that visitors’ time and the number of pages they visit on your site will increase.
To increase time spent on your site, optimizing for mobile devices is key.
Mobile visitors are only going to keep increasing in number. Without a properly optimized mobile site, you are losing out on a good chunk of .
So, friends, ensure your is mobile-friendly.
Traffic Source
Where is your coming from? source answers this question and more.
There are three main types of to focus on in your : referral, direct, and social.
Depending on the nature of your business, you might get more from one specific source. The focus, however, should be on making sure you get from all sources .
Implementing a clear call to action and posting quality can ensure just that!
Referral
Referral refers to visitors visiting your from another web page, blog, or other channels.
The can tell you what sites your is coming from and can present an opportunity to collaborate with other brands.
If you notice that a good amount of your referral is coming from a specific site, you can approach the owners of that site about a collaboration or potential partnership that is beneficial to both parties.
Direct
Direct traffic comes from people typing your brand’s name into a search console.
A high number of direct traffic indicated brand awareness and effective SEO strategies.
The higher your direct traffic is, the better your following and recognition are becoming.
Social
As you can probably guess, social refers to the coming from platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, , Tik Tok, and more.
The more engaging your is, the more people will share it and the more you receive from these platforms.
Bounce Rate
on Google represents the percentage of people who visit your and immediately leave without taking any other action.
The shorter the amount of time someone spends on your site, the less likely you are to convert them.
While it will be impossible to have a of zero, it is important to keep it as low as possible.
When your is high, analyze your for potential reasons and take appropriate action to decrease the .
why your may be high:
- Slow
- Bad product fit or description
- Wrong keywords or
- Broken web pages
- Not optimized for mobile devices
Combining your with sources shows you the source with the highest .
If your highest on Google is coming from a referral site, you can check the referral site and the potential reasons users are leaving your site so soon.
Perhaps the site linking to your site is unrelated or not what the potential is looking for.
Exits
Don’t get confused. Exits are not the same as bounce rates.
Exits are the number of users who viewed multiple pages of your site and when and where they decided to leave.
Exits can help you determine what aspects and pages of your site need to be looked at and possibly be reconfigured.
There will always be certain pages of your site that will have high exit rates. But if there is a page on your site, like a product page, that is getting high exit rates when it shouldn’t be; it can make you question why this is the case.
A couple of reasons it may happen is that your prices are too high, your descriptions are not clear, or a function on the page is not working.
Once you have taken the time to analyze the potential reason for such a high exit rate on your , you can make changes to the page and see how that affects exits in the future.
Conversion Rate
Last but certainly not least, is one of the most essential measurements in Google .
It can tell you if you are reaching your goals or not.
Conversion rates will show you the percentage of users who have fulfilled a specific action on your site.
Goals can include:
- Signing up for emails
- Completing a purchase
- Navigating to a specific page
- Following a CTA
Analyzing against other metrics on your like can help you understand the quality of your leads.
If you have high volume but low conversion rates, that means either you are attracting the wrong audience, or something about your web page needs to be adjusted.
Now that you know how to make quality using Google , it is time to use the metrics above to better understand what is and isn’t working on your site.
Tracking users’ behaviours and using reports on website analytics allows you to gain into how they behave when visiting your . You’ll also have a deeper understanding of how you can improve your in effective communication with your target audiences.
