5 Things You Didn’t Know Google Analytics
Could Tell You About Your Business
If you’re like most business owners, you’re probably using Google Analytics to get bare-bones data and insights about your website, like how many visitors you received last month. However, the data offered from Google Analytics can shed deep insights into your business, from understanding who your customers are to figuring out which source of traffic offers you the best value. Here are just some of the insights you can pull from a deep dive into your Google Analytics account.
1. Find Out Who Your Customers Really Are
You might think you have your customer base down pat, but Google Analytics data might have a different story to tell. Thanks to Google’s all-knowing, all-seeing power, website owners can get information about the age, gender, and location of the people visiting their website.
When you know who your consumers really are, you can tweak your messaging to appeal more to them, consider launching products that cater to this new audience, and learn more about who buys your products/services so you can cater to them in your marketing materials.
To see your visitors’ demographic data, expand the audience menu on the sidebar, then click on demographics and overview. In this view, you’ll be able to see the percentage of people that visit your site that belongs to each age group and gender.
In this view, you can see how many visitors you get from each country. To further narrow it down, click city above the table.
2. Compare Metrics
In this example, I want to find out more about the users who visit my site directly. This could indicate a strong fan base in a specific location as they’re visiting this site directly (indicating they already know about it) instead of being referred through social media or Google.
Another helpful feature that Google Analytics offers is the ability to filter data by multiple metrics. Want to find out how your Pinterest account performs with visitors from New York City? Or maybe find out where your biggest fan base is?
To do this, choose a main metric by navigating to it in the sidebar, and then choose the secondary dimension you want to compare the original data to.
3. Measure How You’re Doing On Social Media
There are a million social networks for us to be on. You could divide your time and resources and make regular posts on each. Indeed, some businesses should. But how do you know what social media network actually makes the most sense for your business and brings you the most results?
Individually looking at each network’s analytics platform is both confusing and time-consuming. Instead, you can use Google Analytics to get a deeper insight into your social traffic.
To see your social metrics, look under the acquisition menu and then click on the social tab. Under network referrals, you can track how many visits you get to your site from each network, the percentage of social traffic that each source comprises, and how many pages on average visitors from each network are exploring on your website.
If you click on landing pages, you can see which pages on your website are most visited through social media.
This view demonstrates how many visitors come from each social media network, how long they stay, and how many pages they view on your website.
4. Identify Low Quality Traffic & Pages
To see how your pages are performing, you’ll navigate to the behavior menu, then click site content and all pages. From there, you can sort by average time on page or bounce rate.
Is it time for your website content to be revamped? Maybe the CTAs on your site are weak and people are leaving instead of sending you their contact information? One way you can identify problems like these is by seeing what pages on your site have a high bounce rate and/or a low page session duration.
A high bounce rate says that people aren’t interested in sticking around. This is generally caused by two major factors: the source of your traffic is of low quality, or the pages on your website are low quality. Similarly, a low session duration can indicate that the page doesn’t keep their attention or it’s not the result they were looking for.
To view bounce rate and session duration by channel, click all traffic and then channels under the acquisition tab. Explore each source of traffic by clicking on each and reviewing the data on the following page.
5. Identify Trends
Google Analytics can help you identify important trends in your business that can help you plan for the future and make better marketing decisions.
For example, you can compare the number of site visits you get year over year. Maybe your Facebook traffic grew by an explosive amount, but search traffic experienced a sharp decline. After seeing this, you might decide to allocate more resources to optimizing your website for search engines and building backlinks.
Or after looking at your data across the past year or two, you see that you get the most site visits in the winter months. How can you capitalize on this knowledge to increase sales during these busy times?
To compare date ranges, expand the field where the date is in the upper right-hand corner. Select the dates you want to compare.
Next, navigate to any submenu in the sidebar to compare data.
In this view, I can see that organic search traffic has declined by 40%, but direct and social traffic have increased significantly. As a business owner, I might decide to dedicate more resources to building up my search presence while continuing with my social media efforts.
Do you need help uncovering insights for your website? Looking for a new marketing strategy that produces real results? Contact us today.