Many people who have a website will know about Google Analytics, but how many use it to its full advantage?
If you are running your own business, it’s really important to know your numbers – that obviously applies to knowing whether you have a profitable business or not, but also applies to data such as website usage.
Google Analytics can tell you so much about the people visiting your website and how they interact with it.
Here are some examples of the useful things you can find out:
- How do people arrive on your website?
- What social media sends people to your website and what doesn’t?
- Are your special offers driving people to your site?
- What do people use to view your website – mobile or desktop PC?
- Demographics of people using your site
- How many pages do they look at?
- How are your adds doing?
Setting Up Google Analytics
If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up for you to monitor your website traffic, then get started. It’s really easy to set up.
Follow these instructions and embed the code into your website to start getting lots of useful data.
What does Google Analytics Tell You?
There’s lots that Google Analytics can tell you as standard and you can drill down quite a long way into the detail too. Here I will share some of the statistics from my site to illustrate how useful the data can be. I’ll be using this to assess whether I’m getting out of my website what I wanted, and where I should be focussed.
“You can drill down quite a long way into the detail”
Technology: We are hearing that people are viewing websites from mobile devices more than ever before (as illustrated by Mary Meeker in her article Mobile Internet Trends – slide 7) but my analytics tell me that 78% of people looking at my website were viewing from a desktop computer, with only 17% viewing from a mobile. My website is mobile optimised, but if yours isn’t and most of your users are viewing from a mobile, it might be worth making sure your site offers this functionality or it could be quite frustrating for them.
Social Media Analytics: You will need to link your social media pages into Google Analytics if you want to track them. Of my social media channels, twice as many people come to my website via Facebook than the other networks put together – however, the conversion rate is not that dissimilar – 34% of viewers via Facebook looked at two pages, vs. 29% from LinkedIn. One person read all ten blogs I’ve written – thank you whoever you are! This gives me a reminder to ensure that I’m posting with links to my website more consistently across my networks.
Viewing time: This blog post indicates that 55% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less on a web page. I’m faring well with 30% spending between 1-10 seconds, but 18% spending 1-3 minutes, 19% spending between 3-10 minutes and 10% spending 30 minutes or more (they must have left it logged in, right?!). The average duration being 2 minutes and 59 seconds. It is possible to see the speed at which people leave your sight, and which pages they looked at whilst they visit. This is useful to me to see whether writing blogs does generate interest in my services as a Virtual Assistant, or whether the reasons for the visits are exclusive.
Bounce Rate: This is the amount of users who leave your website after viewing only one page. There are several reasons that someone may do this, they could have come only to read a particular blog you’ve shared, there could be an error on the page they landed on, or they may just find the page boring. Helpful as always, Google has some tips for improving your bounce rate if you are concerned it might be too high. There do not appear to be an agreed consensus as to what % bounce rate is acceptable, so it’s down to you to decide.
Demographics: These are really useful when considering your ideal customers:
- 55% of my viewers are from the UK – this data really surprised me as I really expected this to be much higher. The UK was followed by Russia, USA and Brazil!
- Most of the people viewing my website are aged 25-34 – I think this is because of my blog posts, but more drilling down is required into that – something for another day;
- Most of my viewers are male (54%)
How will you use Google Analytics?
There is a lot more that analytics can tell you, and what you need to know and how you use it really depends on what you use your website for. The data you gather can be a really useful tool to assess what’s working and what isn’t – and therefore where to focus.
Simply Business have created this fantastic tool to help you on your way, whether you know nothing at all about Analytics or you have it installed but just aren’t using it fully (I probably fall into the latter category!)
I know that I’ll be ensuring that I review mine on a more regular basis to monitor any changes that I put in place.
Do you review your website data? Have you made big changes as a result? I’d love to hear about it.
If you’d like help reviewing your analytics, call us on 07814 218142 or email joanne@joannemanville.co.uk