How to Sound Like a Web Analytics Genius

Google Analytics is essential for any website, from small business and law firm sites to online retail stores, because it helps companies understand their site’s visitors, strategically improve content and design and analyze campaigns. 

Your website should tell a story about your company, and there are a few very important questions to answer when using Google Analytics to cover the basics of that story:

Who are my visitors?

Where are they coming from?

When are they visiting?

What are they doing on my site?

How long are they staying?

Why did they choose my site?

Google Analytics can provide a range of information—a vast overview of your audience or details about an individual visitor. It will help you define your audience, which, in turn, can help with building online ad and social media campaigns. If you know that most of the people who visit your site are 25 to 40-year-old females, your site is most popular in Oregon and the highest traffic time is 6-9 p.m. EST, then you have all the ingredients to target your digital ad campaign, thus driving website traffic.

Two important metrics that help improve site content and design are user flow and bounce rates. Both of these come standard in the Google Analytics platform, and can show you the path a user or users take through your site and when and how quickly they drop off. Why are they leaving? Is your navigation so confusing that visitors do not understand where to find the information they’re searching for? You can resolve this by re-structuring and simplifying your content. Let’s say a page with a flashy wrapper has a high bounce rate. Maybe it is causing your organization to lose credibility with your audience, so they are leaving the site. In this case, consider a simplified design.

Something interesting about Google Analytics is that it has the capability to show a visitor’s real-time movement on a site, which is especially exciting to watch if you have a retail site or are tracking Events. You can see that a person is viewing a product, has added it to his or her shopping cart and see the transaction come through. Then, you can celebrate sales in real-time!

Even if you aren’t conducting e-commerce on your site, consider the transactions you want your visitors to execute. Is there a form you want them to fill out? Some particular information you think is important? You can set up funnels and goals to watch the performance of your efforts to make sure the way you manage your site is working for you and not against you.

Finally, Data Studio is the newest beta tool in Google’s arsenal. It’s a fantastic way to create reports from data in Google Analytics. If you’re a Covalent client, you probably received a Studio Year End report. And if you didn’t or you aren’t… just give us a call to learn more.