Using Google Analytics To Track Visitors
If you’re a business owner or you are looking to market yourself in some way shape or form, you have a website or at least you should, you need to know how visitors are viewing your site. Once you have this information you can set up goals to reach and make adjustments on your site to reach those goals. If you don’t have any goals set, how can you have ambitions of growth and prosperity? Today I’m going to go over looking through Google Analytics and understanding the data because I feel most people are confused by the numbers and graphs presented, your brain goes into information overload. This is going to be kindergarten style but it’s going to be put in a way you can understand.
Let’s get started by saying I’m not endorsing Google Analytics and this is not the only tool out there, but who better to get information from then the grandaddy of all search engines. With that said you’re going to need a Google Analytics Account to get started and all of your website tracking information and scripts loaded to your website. I’m not going to cover that information as they have pretty detailed instruction on how to do it or you can contact me personally to help you set that up.
The Dashboard
When you login to Google Analytics you’re going to see the dashboard (below) showing an overview traffic for the past 30 days not including the current day, so 30 days from yesterday. You’re going to see how many “Sessions”, which are visits; Users, people who came to your site; Pageviews, total number of pages that were looked at by all of the Users; Pages per Session, average number of pages each user visited; Average Session Duration, the average amount of time the uses spend on your site; Bounce Rate, the percentage of users that visit one page and leave; Percent of New Session, percentage of visits that are new. This is some pretty useful info and what I really like is the line graph above that information. You can see when visitors are visiting your site, if you have a wave-like below you can really tell mid-week versus the weekends. During the middle of the week you’re more than likely going to get more visits and on the weekends you’re probably going to get less visits, in most cases. Why you ask? People are at work searching the internet during the week, and on the weekends people are spending time with family and doing chores.
On the left side of the screen you have your navigation through the data. Real-Time shows you how many people are currently on your site, where they’re from, what content they’re looking at, and how they got to your site (Direct, Social, Organic Search Result). Audience will tell you where your users are located, are they new or returning, browser and operating system, what isp they’re using, are they on mobile, screen resolution. Basically anything you want to know about your user outside of Name, birthday, address, and ip address. Acquisition is how the user got to your site, either through search, referral, or social channels. Behavior is, what did the user do when they were on your site, what pages did they visit, what was the last page they saw before they left. Finally, Conversions, is where you can set up your goals and track your results.
Now let’s dive into each section and make useable sense of all of this data. We will only be looking at the Overviews of each section because I’ll end up writing a novel if I use all of the detailed information.
Real-Time
Above is the high-level overview of what the Real-Time section and it fives you some very good insights just at a glimpse . As you can see at the time of this screen capture there are 7 active visitors. Below that it breaks down what platform the users are on, in this case, mobile or desktop. Below the platform you have if visitors were referred from another site, who referred them, send them a tank you email. Below the referrals you have social traffic, if they came from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media outlet. After that, if they found you by a search engine result, it will tell you what key term or phrase they typed in to find you. The bar graph at the top shows you pageviews per minute and per second. Under that you can see what content the visitors are currently looking at. Finally under that you can see where your visitors are located, I have filtered out the results to just the United Stated but you can see visitors from around the globe.
Audience
The audience section always gets me really excited as a developer. This section details what your users are viewing your site on. If you see that a number of your visitors are viewing your site in Internet Explorer, make sure your site functions and looks right in Internet Explorer. If a large number of your visitors is viewing your site on mobile devices, make sure your site is mobile friendly. This section is where you can also get an idea of where you’re getting visits from, different cities, states and countries. You can see how far you reach. If you click on any of the links on the left side you will pull the top tens for that category and it will show up to the right. For instance I have Browser selected so I’m seeing the to ten browsers that my site is being viewed in.
Acquisition
The acquisition section is interesting for everyone because it gives you an understanding of where your traffic coming from. If you’re using any paid search programs or social media, you can see how many visitors are coming from those sources. This is important so you know where to focus your digital marketing efforts and you know what’s working and what’s not and if you should take a different approach at a marketing strategy. The marketing side of me lives in this area and it’s because of the information I’ve gotten over the years has given me valuable insights on what actually works with proof so I can help make other websites successful.
Behavior
The behaviors section is a very interesting section because it details how your visitors are interacting with your site. From the Overview section you can see the top ten most viewed pages on your site. Also if you have a search box on your site, you can see what people are searching for on your site, this is nice because it gives you insight on what people expect to see when they visit, and if you don’t have that content you can create it. What I really like about this section, that you can’t see in the image above is there’s a link in the left column that says “Behavior Flow” and it shows What page visitors have landed on from external sources, where most traffic goes from that first page, if visitors leave the site from that page, if they go to another page. This is powerful in the fact you can see where most people are leaving and if people are indeed exploring your site and what they’re interested in viewing. You can then modify your content strategy and get ides on what people want to read on your site. There is a lot to this section, more than I can cover in this post. Again I could write a book just on this section alone, and I may write an E-Book in the future just for that.
Conversions
This is probably the most important areas of Google Analytics, setting Goal and tracking them. It is important to set conversion goals so you can track you ROI on you digital assets. At the end of the day you’ve spent money on these digital assets you need to know that you’re getting your return or figure how to get your return. I will write a more detailed guide at a later date to set these up. The great thing about setting up conversion goals is you can track the pipeline, seeing if people are following the steps for conversion or where they’re falling off so you can better optimize the fall off point.
Conclusion
I hope I was able to give you a better idea on where to look to track your website visitors and what kind of information and possibilities you have with this system. I can’t stress the importance of using the data collected to increase your ROI on your digital assets. If you have any questions on Google Analytics and the data it produces please feel free to contact me and I’ll help you make more sense of the data and I can even help you come up with goals and a conversion plan.