How to Get Useful Information from Google Analytics

Below are several important questions that you should ask yourself when looking at analytics data. These are certainly not the only questions that should be asked, but they should among the first.This guide should be used by businesses that have their own website; particularly those who view their website as part of their [online] marketing strategy. This guide should help these businesses better understand the data generated by their website’s analytics software, and help them make better-informed decisions on how to improve their customers’ online experience.

Steps

1.Find out what visitors are looking for when they visit our website. When people search for specific words or phrases in a search engine (like Google or Bing) and click on a result that pops up, the words they searched for are called keywords, and the visitors are called organic traffic.

• Your website should show up highly among search results for the keywords that your business is all about. The keywords your visitors use to find your website can potentially indicate market demand, and thus where your business should focus.
• Note that for small business websites with little or no search engine optimisation (SEO), most traffic to their websites will be direct; where the visitors weren’t searching for a keyword, but rather they knew they wanted to visit that business’ website.

2.Find out what kinds of people are visiting your website. The visitors of your website, called your audience, can be anyone from anywhere in the world. But the people who should be visiting your website are your target market. You can use the demographic, geographic and behaviour data to determine whether the visitors to your website are who you were targeting.

• The developer of your website will also use audience data from the analytics to determine if the website is designed and developed in the best way for them.

3.Find out which content is most valuable to your visitors. If the navigation (menus and individual links and buttons) is well-designed, then visitors will be able to go to any place within your website. The pages they choose to visit are likely to be the pages they came for, or the pages that seem most attractive. The visitors may also interact with the content in your webpages, such as using the website search, and filling in forms.

• You should use the popularity of the content of your website to decide if the website is fulfilling its purpose; whether that is to inform them, entertain them, create a social community for them, or sell your products and services to them.

4.Find out which aspects of your website are frustrating your visitors the most. The content mentioned above can frustrate visitors if it isn’t as good as they’re expecting. What they think and feel during their visit is called their user experience (UX), and poor UX is often caused by basic design problems and technical problems.

• Indications of this frustration are people leaving your website from a particular page, called exits, and people leaving from the same page that they just arrived at your website on, called bounces.
• Unfortunately it’s usually almost impossible to see why a visitor left your website from a particular page, which is why your website should be tested with user groups before significant redesign launches.

5.Find out how many of your visitors are going where you want them to go. As mentioned above, your website should have a purpose, and thus goals that you’d like it to achieve, called conversion. Most website goals can be written in terms of analytics metrics such as visiting a particular number of information pages, completing the buying process, or simply visiting the contact page and filling in the contact form. You should track the percentage of visitors that achieve a goal, to determine how much work you need to spend improving the website.