Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website

using-google-analytics

Google Analytics is possibly the best web tracking and analytics software packages on the market. Recent studies have shown that as calculated by Alexia ranking, over 56% of the top 100,000 websites have installed Google Analytics. This suggests that majority of the best websites on the web are using Analytics to track their websites performance. Don’t be fooled that just because Google Analytics is free that it is uncompetitive with other analytics platforms as it is quite the opposite. In many cases it is better than other costly solutions. This tool contains so many valuable features that it would take many more than this article to cover the entirety, however from the wealth of data and reports that this tool can provide I am going to show you four key features that your as a website owner you can’t live without.

This past week I have spent quite a lot of my free time after hours studying at Google’s Conversion University to learn about some of the hidden features and data that is available from within their Analytics software. Back in 2006 I was one of the lucky web developers lucky to received a first round invitation from Google to participate in their analytics platform. Since then our team at Alaress and I have been using Google Analytics to analyse and improve nearly all of the websites that we work on. I always knew how great Analytics was however this past week I have learned more about some of the more advanced features which unlock Analytics true potential. I will mention briefly these advanced features later on however they are best left for you to learn from the documentation that Google provides.

Most people that have Google Analytics installed probably don’t stray far from the user friendly dashboard that is presented after first logging in. To some this snapshot report is all they need to assess the health of the website and it’s traffic. However, in my opinion they would not be making the most of this tool and certainly missing key information that could help them improve their website. Google Analytics is capable of generating up to 85 different reports (and this is before custom reporting).

Here are four key sections that you need to measure and improve the value and performance of your website:

Pageviews, Visits, and Visitors

In Google Analytics, every time a page on your website loads, a pageview is counted. A visitor is uniquely identified by a Google Analytics visitor cookie which assigns a random visitor ID to the user, and combines it with the timestamp of the visitor’s first visit.

Within the Dashboard and Visitors section of Analytics you are able to get a great breakdown on the number of visits, unique visitors, visitor loyalty, trends, average pageviews, time on site and bounce rate at a glance. This first section has so much information about who your users are and how they are interacting with your website.

Drilling down further you will find more about your visitors including what Internet browser they use, whether or not your viewers have Flash installed, what operating systems they run and more.

One of the great features in this section is the Map Overlay. With proper configuration of Filters, this report enables you to report for example on which keywords from visitors that found your website from an organic search result that are from Australia (or on a city level such as Melbourne), had the highest conversion rate. Using this information you could decide that you should invest more in these keywords in your SEO strategies as they prove to drive a higher conversion rate and improve your bottom line.

Viewing the visitor and pageview data might display a high number of new visits suggesting that you are successful at driving traffic to your site or alternatively a high number of return visits might suggest that your website’s content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

You can also view the report on recent visits to see how recently visitors have visited and the loyalty report shows how frequently they return.

Content

The content section of the reports contains the information you need to assess which areas and pages of your website are performing best. It also provides insight into how your users are navigating and interacting with your website.

  • Some usefull reports include:
  • Top Content
  • Top Landing pages
  • Top Exit Pages, and my personal favorite,
  • Site Overlay

Traffic Sources

You can use the reports in the traffic sources section to understand where your traffic is coming from on the web. This enables you to isolate which sources are sending you the highest quality traffic.

You will be able to drill down based on organic search engine traffic or isolate visits relating to pay-per-click campaigns such as Google AdWords. You can also see direct, referral (visits from links to your website from another website) and other campaign related traffic such as email marketing or banner advertising campaigns.

The Keywords report is another very useful section for understanding what visitors typed into search engines and searched for when they clicked through to your website. These terms would reflect what content these visitors were expecting to find on your page when they landed on your website. Using this information you can improve the content on these pages to make it more relevant to what people are expecting to find.

If you have been running a pay per click advertising campaign you can use this report to  isolate your paid keywords with a high bounce rate. You should then use this information to evaluate whether your landing pages are relevant enough to the users clicking your ads. This can enable you to improve the conversion rates of your ads. Alternatively if you feel your landing pages are relevant and high quality and you still receive high bounce rates then you may consider whether you should continue to pay for clicks from those keywords.

You can view keyword reports by both Paid (ie Adwords) and Non-Paid (ie SEO). By understanding which keywords from which campaigns are producing website conversions you can ensure that your focus is aligned and any SEO efforts are targeting the keywords that are producing results.

Looking at the keywords and highest traffic drivers is a start, but it doesn’t tell you whether the traffic was qualified. In other words, did the traffic you received help you achieve the goals you’ve set for your site?

GOALS

If you have installed Analytics, it is an crucial that you set up goal tracking. Goals can be created to be one of three types:

  • URL destination,
  • Time on site, or
  • Pages/Visit

Without going into too much detail, a basic goal configuration is to set up a URL destination to be a “Thank you” page from which you would forward your users to once they complete an enquiry form. Each time a user completes the form and the “Thank you” page is viewed, a “Goal Conversion” is recorded. This is a very important measurement tool and an extremely great feature because you can attibute a value to each goal and this lets you measure the monetary value that your website is generating for your business based on how many goal conversion you are generating.

Other examples of goals might be:

  • eCommerce transactions (Although there is an entire section in Google Analytics that can be configured for tracking eCommerce and transaction value. If you have an eCommerce website and do not have this configuration set up, do it today!)
  • New Member Sign-ups
  • Users spending a minimum of 5 minutes on your website

Setting up goals is an important step and will provide you a higher level of reporting detail from within Google Analytics. With tracking code on every page and conversion goals set up correctly you will be able to analyse your website to improve its performance, value and ROI.

Other Amazing Features

This article has only briefly touched on the some of the main sections and reports available in Google Analytics. If you are interested in further reading some of the more advanced features that you could choose to learn about are:

  • Ecommerce reporting and tracking of transactions
  • Advanced management of accounts and profiles
  • Integration with Google AdWords and Google AdSense
  • Complete campaign tracking capabilities to enable tracking of email campaigns, banner ads, offline ads and more.
  • Mobile Tracking
  • Internal Site Search
  • Advance visitor segmentation
  • Filters
  • Benchmarking
  • Flash, video and social network application tracking

Google Qualified Individual

After spending time learning about these advanced features and putting them into practice I recently sat and passed the exam required to be a Google Analytics Qualified Individual. For more information and learning resources the next best stop for you in Google’s Conversion University where you can find all of the features mentioned here documented and presented in more detail.

Tips for the road:

  • One of the best tip that an experienced Analytics professional can give is that you don’t look at the numbers too closely but use the information presented to isolate “Trends” in your traffic and visitor behaviour.
  • Use Google’s URL Builder to build URL’s that you can add to your other campaign links to ensure that Analytics will recognise these visitors and traffic and report on it correctly. This will allow you to get accurate data from email campaigns, offline advertising, banner advertising, paid advertising and much more.
  • Ensure that you set up your goals and assign a goal value to track your website performance. This metric is a vital measurement from which you will be able to improve your website.

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