Google Analytics is popular by choice, and many of our clients request it to be added to their site. Once it is added, they can view how many users have visited their site, and know whether or not these are returning visitors, or new visitors. They can analyze how users got to their site, whether it was a keyword search in a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, or if it was a referral from another website. They can also view which pages were viewed the most and the technical stats such as which browser they were using and if it was on a mobile device.
While all of this information is informative, many might not use this information effectively.
Analyzing your data should be a perpetual means of reanalyzing your own site and customizing it to the interests of your users.
Review your traffic.
How are people getting to your site? Google Analytics is broken into 3 main traffic categories: Search, Referral and Direct. Search refers to the keywords users typed into search engines that resulted in your site. Referral traffic shows how a user got to your site from another domain. This can be important if you are engaged in referral relationships with other websites; you can then see if your relationships are actually generating traffic. Direct traffic is when users directly type in your website, which pages most often appear in auto-completion, or who have it bookmarked.
Put that information to use.
Getting a general idea of why your site generates traffic from certain keywords, referral sites or direct traffic can give you an idea of the most successful pages to your site. You might want to focus campaigns on these particular items users search for, and make sure you keep certain pages that are frequently visited fresh and updated.
What are they looking at?
Take a look at your Content Overview. This outlines the pages that are visited the most on your site and shows you what content users are most engaged in. If you drill down into Overview/Site Content/All Pages, you will have more information about the pages users are looking at. Here you can get an idea of many times a particular page was viewed and for how long it was viewed. Pageviews shows how many times the page was viewed, and includes the amount of repeated views. Unique pageviews shows how many times a page was viewed at least once. Entrances indicates if this particular page was the initial page users gained entrance to your site. Bounce Rate indicates whether or not a user left the particular page without interacting with it. % Exit indicates if this particular page was the last page on your site that was viewed by the user.
Put that information to use.
Content analysis helps you determine on a per page basis the popularity of a page based off of its Pageviews and it’s integrity through Entrances, Bounce Rate and % Exit. If a page comes up frequently as an Entrance page, then you want to make sure the page is updated frequently. If you have an e-commerce site and a particular product’s page is a frequent Entrance page, then you maybe want to offer a special on it to entice your customers. If a page has a high bounce rate, you first need to determine if there are any usability issues such as malfunctioning scripts, or slow loads. If these are not an issue, there could be other factors such as a user needing only the information on that page and/or they have no interest in visiting other pages. Sometimes determining the reason for bounce rates are not very clear.
In this article, we only focused on analyzing your traffic and content analytics. Look out for future articles that discuss other aspects of your analytical reporting. If you have questions about your site’s traffic, feel free to contact us for consulting.
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