Google Analytics is powerful and a free web analytics tool that businesses can use to track website traffic, learn customer behavior data, and help them better understand reasons for lesser traffic and conversion.
Effective use of google analytics can improve traffic and sales by making few adjustments to your marketing campaigns.
Unfortunately, most of the businesses/marketers are not using Google Analytics to its full potential. We can easily find the reports on the vanity metrics within the platform. Vanity metrics means sessions, users, stay time, page views, and other metrics that sound important.
Well, it sounds great to have one million sessions, but that metric doesn’t provide any actionable data. In fact, vanity metrics don’t provide much value to the business.
Instead, Marketers should focus on the actionable metrics that will help in improving and optimizing performance. Actionable insights help marketers create plans to improve website performance in terms of creating new content, implement schema, updating site structure, or many other aspects of a website.
Google Analytics provides so much data and information, it can be difficult to know what’s most important and truly understand what to do with the information.
Below are the ways that marketers can use Google Analytics to gather valuable insights and design plans or campaigns based on those insights.
Custom Alerts Set up
Setting up a customizable feature allows marketers to create alerts for unusual activity such as large rises or drops in traffic, bounce rate, or in conversion rate. Custom alerts are useful as it is difficult to check Google Analytics on daily basis.
For set up, simply go to “Admins” and click “Custom Alerts” under the Property View section. It can be applied to all traffic or segments and alerts will come directly through email or text message.
Page Speed
Page Speed or website load time is factored into search engine optimization and slow load speeds can cause customers to bounce right away. Understanding page load time is useful for diagnosing problems on the website. One can access this by clicking “Behaviour” then “Site Speed”.
Blog posts can have bounce rates as high as 60-70%, however, anything over that should be cause for concern. Normal website pages have a lower bounce rate ranges between 30-40%.
Real-Time Data
Google Analytics allows marketers to view their performance in real-time. They can identify the volume of users on the website, where they are coming from, and where they are going and troubleshooting any issues.
To navigate, click “Real-Time” and “Overview,” or dig into the user’s location, referral source, actions, and conversion events.
Mobile & Desktop Conversion Rates
Nowadays, mobile internet users outpace desktop so, mobile and tablet experiences for users need to be as good as one for desktop users.
We can quickly measure up mobile and tablet conversions compared with desktop by clicking the “Audience Section” in Google Analytics. These results can provide the information marketers need for more funds and better resources.
After clicking on the audience section, go to the mobile > overview. Select primary goal conversion under the Conversions section. Discrepancies between devices can be seen directly in the Engagement or Behaviour section.
Conversions don’t happen only after seeing one page or being on the site for under a minute. So, besides an obviously low bounce rate marketers should see higher Pages / Session and Average Session Duration.
The first clue to a poor mobile experience is significantly lower numbers on mobile and tablet. The next one is the conversion rate number of each device which is generally, higher is better.
So lower conversion rates on mobile or tablet should be a warning sign.
Behavior Flow Tracking
User behavior flow is an important insight that affects the marketing strategies. The feature is great for tracking and understanding how they are navigating the site and where they are dropping off.
In behavior flow, the home page is the focal point for how the rest of the site going to look and function. In other words, it’s the starting point for the brand, where users begin their journey and find out where to go next.
However, that’s not always the case. Roughly, the homepage will only account for 30% of the incoming traffic. Rest can be a long-tail blog topic, case studies, or the pages which have more informational or educational topic queries.
To access it, open the Behaviour Flow underneath the Behaviour section. Now filter the traffic based on the Source/Medium it’s coming through. Google/Organic will help in finding the organic search visitors of the website.
As shown in the picture, the first section is the stating pages or the landing pages, people are coming to first from Google.
Tracking Website Searches
This insight allows marketers to see what users are searching for on the website. To get quick SEO insight, simply view the terms currently sending traffic in the queries report.
The objective here is to identify all the pages or terms currently ranking on the second page of Google, where fewer people clicks it, improve those and get them ranking on the first page to get better traffic.
To configure it in Google Analytics, go to the Admin section, click view settings in the rightmost column, then scroll down to Site Search Setting and click the slider on.
Once you have identified the search terms, you can also apply advanced filters. These will help you narrow down results into something a little more actionable.
Now you can sort the terms according to the search engine result page position and see which term is showing on the first and second page. Find high potential underperforming terms or pages and improve them to come up on the first page.
Raw data, by itself, is meaningless. But these different reports can help layer in context and gain actionable insight that has the power to increase leads and sales overnight.
Here we have discussed the only tip of the iceberg of what Google Analytics has to offer and how to convert those into actionable insights.
By analyzing this data, marketers can develop greater marketing strategies, drive SEO, site traffic, and increased sales.
