5 Things to monitor in your Google Analytics

  • Marketing

Written by: Action Digital

It’s all very well having a great product to sell and a fancy website to market it on, but without an efficient and easy way to monitor your progress, it can be hard to know whether you are going in the right direction. Step forward Google Analytics, an invaluable tool in helping you track your website’s performance and keep an eye on your digital marketing campaigns. Although the tool is there to make things easier for your business, the amount of data collected can be confusing so we’ve put together a comprehensive list of five things you should monitor on a regular basis when it comes to Google Analytics.

  • Visits, unique visitors and page views: By collecting and analysing data from visitors, Google Analytics can teach you how they are using your site, but it’s also important to know the numbers of visitors and unique visitors to your site, and compare these figures week-by-week and month-by-month. Page views are important as they will show you how many pages visitors are clicking on during their time on your site. If your most important pages aren’t getting enough views, it might be time to consider shaking things up a bit.
  • Traffic sources: Google Analytics allows you to see exactly where the visitors to your site are coming from. Perhaps they clicked through to you via Facebook, perhaps they found you through a Google search, however these visitors landed on your page, by analysing your traffic sources you will be able to focus your marketing campaigns across the platforms that will ensure you reach the largest majority of your target audience.
  • Bounce Rate: In internet terms, bounce is a term used when a visitor leaves your site after only spending a very short time there, perhaps visiting only one page before leaving. There can be multiple reasons behind a bounce from your site. Maybe the user landed there by mistake, perhaps the landing page was poorly optimised and the loading speed was too slow; potentially they didn’t find what they were looking for or couldn’t find the subsequent call-to-action that would lead to a purchase. Monitoring your bounce rate can help you improve the design, content, layout or efficiency of your site leading to a higher conversion rate down the line.
  • Mobile Device Performance: Today increasing numbers of people are accessing the internet via their mobile phones making the mobile optimisation of your website an essential component to the success of your business. Google Analytics allows you to not only see a breakdown of exactly how many people are visiting your site using their mobile phones, it also provides you with information pertaining to the engagement metrics of each visit so you’ll be able to compare both the bounce rates and the conversion rates for the various categories and make improvements accordingly.
  • Conversion Rate: A stunningly beautiful website that doesn’t convert visitors from casual browsers, to real measurable action takers, is practically useless to your business. Watching the conversion rate of your site is very important to discern whether visitors are impressed, comfortable or convinced enough by the content to take action. A good place to start is to set some clearly defined goals within Analytics. These can be anything from minimum visitor duration, to signing up for a newsletter. Once set, these conversion goals can be tracked to monitor whether your goals are being accomplished and if not, why and how to adapt and improve.

Here at Action Digital we can install, train and guide you on Google Analytics, so that you can start monitoring your site statistics and improving your business accordingly. We’re looking forward to hearing from you so get in touch today.

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