Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that generates detailed statistics about activity on a website. You can get more information on Google’s Official website where they explain how this tool helps you analyze visitor traffic and in the process painting a complete picture of your audience and their needs. Google Analytics uses first party cookies on each visitor’s and this is what aggregates visitor data into your account. I will write a an article about cookies in the coming weeks but for now, lets concentrate on Google Analytics.

A few weeks ago, we had a client who had a website that was not working for them. Well, we got to listen to their story and how they had their website for almost two years without a single sale that was generated via their website. The first question you ask a client in this instance is whether they were getting traffic but no orders or if they were just not getting traffic. Well, the only way to know this is if you have Google Analytics setup which in this case our client did not have. What this meant was that there was two years of data that would have given us a lot of information about how people were using or not using their website.

If you don’t know if anyone is coming to your website, how are you measuring it’s effectiveness?

Why You Need To Know How People Are Using Your Website

There must be a good reason you have website. In most cases it’s a way of driving potential clients to your business or maybe you use it to interact with your existing clients by way of contact forms, blog posts or any sort of input area. Having analytics will allow you to monitor if your website is meeting that goal Analytics allows you to monitor if your website is meeting that goal. If you are not getting any traffic on your website, then you have a really big problem. Why have a website if nobody is visiting it?

Google Analytics Provides Powerful Insights 

Having analytics setup for your website will help you know who is visiting your website, when, how long they stayed, what they were looking at and how they got there. By having this information, you will be able to work on the weaknesses and improve on the strengths of your website and thus making it better overall. Below are a few examples that we have picked up just to demonstrate how this works.

Example #1: Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of site visitors who are coming to your website and leaving before viewing any other pages. Usually, they check out one page and leave. If your website has a very high bounce rate, that means there is something that is not right on your website. Getting to know what is not keeping your visitors longer on your website is key. Could it be that the content is not appealing or maybe the graphics are way off or could it be the graphics. If you know the point of entry and exit, it is very easy to assess why they are leaving and make changes to try remedy that.

Example #2: Devices

It is very important to know what kind of devices people are using to access your website. If you notice that most of your visitors are using mobile devices to access your website, then you need to critically analyze your website to determine if it is properly optimized for mobile devices. If it is not optimized for these devices, you need to make sure it does. By properly optimized, I mean showing exactly what users want quickly, clearly and efficiently.

Example #3: Referrals

Google Analytics will let you know where traffic from your website is originating from. You can easily tell if they are clicking  through from your social media accounts meaning your social media marketing is working. It also lets you know if your traffic is coming from backlinks, or in simpler terms other websites or from an AdWords campaign meaning  your ads are working. A lack of referrals means nobody is clicking a link anywhere to get to your website and this means you need to have quality backlinks for your website.

Summary

Yes, Google analytics is quite a complicated thing to use but worth the trouble. There is so much data there but having the basics can prove to be very important in helping you tune up your website for the traffic that will turn into conversions. If you have any questions or additions to this article, please free to drop a word or two in the comments section.