Who is visiting your website, on what devices, at what times, in what locations? How are people coming to your website — is it directly, through social media, a referring website, particular keywords, or something else? Which pages of content are most popular, and where do your visitors go after they hit your site?
Knowing the answer to these questions and more will help your brand learn who is interested in you, which content/topics perform best, how your audience interacts, and where to spend resources for maximum effect.
Go here to access an Google Analytics demo of the Google Merchandise Store if you don’t already have your own configured. There you can navigate along with the 7 ways you’ll benefit from Google Analytics I’ll share with you below plus TONS of other things too.
1. Learn who your visitors are
On the Demographics section, you can learn how many of your visitors are male versus female and their age gets broken down too. You can see their interests, what country, state or even city they hail from, and the language they use too. It’s also nice knowing how many of your visitors are new versus returning and how long they spent on your site. But be sure that you are looking at the specific timeframe you’d like to see by toggling between months and years at the top right.
2. Discover the devices & technology of your visitors
Knowing if your visitors are using iPhones more than Android is helpful when choosing designers for your app or website (and testing it!), or are computers/laptops actually accessing your site more? Learn that here. But what about which browsers they’re using?
3. Know which pages perform best
Here you’ll see which pages are most visited from your website with the content drilldown here. Also, the Behavior Flow page is fantastic. It shows you if visitors come in one Page A, where/what page do they next visit broken down my popularity, and the best thing is that it is visual like a flow chart. YES!
4. Understand how your visitors are finding you
Before spending precious advertising funds (or even your time with organic or other staff-utilized tasks), how are your current visitors finding you? With Google Analytics’ Acquisition section you can find out. It will breakdown sources like organic, direct, social media, referral sites, paid search, and affiliates. This information is extremely helpful to know where you are most visible and where you might want to consider improving.
5. Compare yourself to your industry
Do you want to know how you stack up against your competitors in your industry? You can with benchmarking’s channels, which when set up, can show you how well or poor your brand is doing across various acquisition channels (previously discussed) like social media, referrals, direct, email marketing, organic, and paid search.
6. See data on who finds you via Google Search
When you tie your Search Console up with your Google Analytics account you can see “data about what users see in Google search results before they decide to click to your site (or some other site). You can use this data to identify opportunities and prioritize development effort to increase the number of visitors to your site,” Google says. Pretty neat!
7. Set goals and alerts when they get met
Have a goal you’d like to make? Set it here (they’ll be a red button that says “+new goal”), and then create custom alerts when you get x visitors in a given timeframe or you sell more than $X, or you have a particular other goal met.
A few last things. Remember, all data you view is by a particular timeframe. To adjust that, go to the top right of the page to change the day, month, or year for the start and end time period. Then, you’ll also want to exclude your computer and network’s IP address so you and your colleagues’ visits to your site don’t get included. Also, check on your site’s speed here and Google’s helpful suggestions here. As always, if you have questions about Google Analytics, understanding your data, or other marketing concerns please contact us.
Among Austin marketing firms, GoodBuzz Solutions harnesses the best of marketing, communications, and events to empower the brands of entrepreneurs, public figures, and organizational leaders to become more visible so they can achieve their goals and be the best. Put your marketing expertise to the test by taking the free GoodBuzz Online Marketing Assessment here. The quiz will evaluate you in seven core areas with 31 questions. Your immediate marketing score will identify your strengths and show you where you can polish your strategy – all for free!