Understanding Google Analytics
There are many blogs that will explain how to integrate Google Analytics into your website but not many that explain why Google Analytics is so vital for your business! Google Analytics is a fantastic way to learn about your website traffic and where it's coming from.
On the home page of your analytics you will see some really helpful data such as the number of users you've had in the last 7 days, where these users have come from, the pages they're visiting, on what device and where from. Looking at this you can answer some important website questions such as do I need to be mobile friendly? Has a recent campaign worked? Am I showing up in search results?
In the audience tab I get a clearer view of what's working and what isn't in terms of getting traffic to my website. Look at the graph below, I can see that whatever I did on the 28th December caused a big spike in website traffic. When looking back at campaigns, social media posts, emails etc. this will really help me to determine what's working when it comes to advertising my business and sending traffic to my website.
Another metric I love to check is the 'top channels' in the acquisition overview - this shows me where my users have come from (direct, organic search, social media or referrals). With referrals you can see which site has sent the user your way, with socials you can see which platforms are performing the best for you. Organic search is the most rewarding for me as when I first started this number was 0, search engines take a while to notice your site and I had to work hard to build my SEO (it's harder not having a physical store, I work with clients all over the world) so to see that nearly a third of my website traffic is now coming from search engine results is fantastic; it's organic too which means I don't pay for this, there aren't any campaigns involved, I've just worked hard to improve my SEO organically.
Other benefits of Google Analytics:
- It's FREE!
- You don't need to keep track of this data - Google does it for you! You can have a look at previous analytics and set the time frames for whenever you'd like going back months and even years, meaning you don't need to gather this data and store it somewhere, Google does it for you.
- Why are users leaving?! Bounce rate is an important metric - it's the measure of how many people leave the site after visiting just one page. It's important to reduce this rate as much as possible so having Google keep an eye on it for you is only beneficial.
- Know where to target - because you can see details such as social media platform results you can understand what is and isn't working. You may decide to put more work into the ones that aren't working, or only focus on those that are!
Google Analytics is a fantastic, free tool that can give you a massive insight to your business. What statistics are you most interested in?