Google Analytics is a fantastic product that can provide rich insights into your businesses strategy. For those businesses with websites, Google Analytics tracks visitors who browse your website. The product is so robust, it's possible to segment your visitors and conduct a deep dive analysis of potential customers. In addition to segmenting visitors, you can also build a marketing funnel in which you can track conversions.
To marketers, this tool is almost like the Bible. Those that understand the capabilities of this software can leverage it to their advantage.
In this blog post, I will specifically discuss the topic of analyzing who your visitors are. This allows you to focus on your business and develop pages that will cater to potential customers. Before we get started, it’s best to login to Google Analytics while I discuss some of the key features of the section "visitors". Once you login, click the Visitors tab on the left hand side. For the purpose of this blog, I will simply talk about the overview page, and how we can use this information to build a better website. This blog will help build the foundation of understanding this tool, and will start to provide insights into who your customers are.
Right off the bat, we can see how many people have visited our website and how they have engaged with the content. The metrics listed on this page help illustrate this engagement. Here are some definitions if you are unfamiliar with the terms listed on this page:
Visits – The amount of people who have loaded your website with ‘fresh cookies’
Absolute Unique Visitors – The absolute unique number of visitors who have visited your site
Pageviews – The amount of pages that are loaded on your site by visitors
Average Pageviews / user – How many pages a user browses on your site
Time on site – How much time a browser spent on your website
Bounce Rate – What percent of people immediately leave your website after visiting only one page
New Visitors – The percent of new visitors to your website
After reviewing these terms, now we are ready to start understanding and analyzing this data.
Let’s start off by trying to answer a few questions regarding the use of the website:
Are visitors taking advantage of the website by viewing more than 4 pages on average?
Is our bounce rate higher than 40%? If so, our website may be overwhelming to visitors- or too difficult to navigate.
If we scroll down to the technical profile, we can then see which browsers our visitors use- and even their connection speed. This can help guide decisions regarding the structure of your website. For example, if you have a website that is mainly based in flash, yet most of your browsers don’t have flash…this could be extremely traumatic to your business. Understanding who your visitors are, and how they engage with your website, will ultimately guide the development of your site. Next week we will discuss analyzing how visitors browse your website, and how you can optimize your layout to maximize each visit.
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