In any business, it is important to understand who your customers are to better speak to them through advertising and throughout the pages and content on your website. When interacting with users digitally, you aren’t going to necessarily meet users personally, so in order to get to know them, you'll need to utilize certain tools like Google Analytics. Whether you still need to add this tool to your website, or your website developer integrated it for you - if you don’t know how to read or use it, you are missing out on information that could elevate your digital presence and advertising campaigns.
Google Analytics is a hosted web analytics tool that collects and reports data about websites and their visitors. The tool is important in order to truly use your business’ website to its full potential, giving you the most from your investment. It helps you identify who your visitors are, how they find your site, how your site content is performing, and when the visitors convert into customers. All of this information is simple to access by placing a bit of code into the back-end of your website.
The analytics tool provides you with dimensions, which are attributes or characteristics of your site’s visitors, as well as metrics measurements associated with your visitors.
Each dimension is automatically and neatly organized into relevant groups or segments (see example below):
While the tool provides you with quite a bit of indispensable information, it is useless if you do not understand what it means. Many of the dimension information is straight forward, such as seeing where visitors are from. However, the metrics can be confusing if you do not understand what they fully include.
Some of these metrics can be easily confused for one another. For instance, when you hear about “Bounce Rate” and “Exit Rate.” The exit rate indicates the percentage of pageviews to a specific page that were the final within a session. The bounce rate shows the percentage of sessions that start on a specific page and were the only page viewed in a session, indicating the user did not go elsewhere on the site.
Complex segments within the reporting can help you dive even deeper into the visitors to your site. For example, you can see the city users come from then broken down into how they found your website, as well as info into their session durations and bounce rate. The complex segments are important as they can help you better determine how to direct your advertising messages and goals to specific users, such as encouraging users who find you through a social source to view your video and subscribe to your newsletter as that had shown success. Below is an example of complex segments broken down:
You can also use the Google Analytics URL Builder to add UTM codes to specific website URLs, which will allow you to track users who click on the specific link. These are great to use for digital ads as it will show you the information based on those who saw your ad and decided to click to your site from there.
Analytics can also be used to set up and track on-site conversions. Tracking conversions is important in providing you with real evidence that your campaign goals are working, or perhaps if they aren’t working as well as you anticipated. Conversions could be based on:
The information that is provided via Google Analytics is essential to any digital presence or advertising campaign. Having an accurate view of your site’s performance will allow you to tailor your messages and website for a better experience for new and returning customers. The information is available for you to view and use – don’t let your investment into a website go to waste! To learn more about your Google Analytics, or to get started, contact us today.