9 February 2016

Google

Google Analytics Explained - Part 1

What is it?

Do you want to know what is driving leads and sales to your website, or why you are not? With Google Analytics you can find out just about anything. It is a free Web analytics service to all Google account holders, that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing purposes. It tracks and reports web traffic in all directions.

What does Google Analytics tell you?

Google Analytics provides you with all the information you need in order for your business to make changes when it comes to understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It gives you a better understanding of your visitors, various traffic sources, the content of your website as well as conversions and reports.

You can monitor the following:

• How many visitors your site has had
• Visitor behaviour: who has visited your site and how many of these are repeat or unique visitors
• Where your visitors are looking at your site from (e.g. geographical location)
• How the visitors have reached your site (e.g. ads, referrals, link, emails)
• Which pages on your site have been visited the most
• What products have been viewed the most
• Find out what your ‘bounce rate’ is (number of visitors who leave your site without visiting other pages)
• The average time visitors spend on your site – the more time they spend the more engaged they are

These are just some of the benefits of Analytics. Lets’ have a look at some of these in a bit more detail.

Benefits of Google Analytics

Visitors

Want to know how many users visited your site or even how long someone spent on your website? With Analytics you can do just about all of that. It provides you with invaluable information such as the number of visitors to your site, unique visitors and even page views. It also shows you the average time a user spent on your site, along with the bounce rate (percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after only viewing one of your pages) as well as the percentage of new visits to your site. Overall this gives you a good overview of how well your site is doing, or not. You can view your visitor behaviour. This means you can see how many of your visitors are new or returning, giving you an idea of your loyal customers! Not forgetting it shows you how long visitors are spending on your site. Those who stay on your site longer are more engaged! It doesn’t stop there. The best thing about this section is, you can also see where your visitors are viewing your site from! Amazing right?

Traffic Sources

This section is one of the most important parts of your Analytics account, because it shows how powerful your SEO techniques are, the strength of your AdWords and so forth. It also shows your weaknesses. In order to do well, you want your traffic to come from a variety of sources. An important report in this section is the keywords report. As this is vital to figure out how your search traffic is finding your site. Analytics tracks every keyword used, not just the top keywords. If you use thing along with AdWords you will get more detailed reports. The important thing to remember is you want to make sure your ads are generating enough revenue or conversions to make them worthwhile.

Content

This section represents page views and unique page views. What’s the difference between the two? Page view is recorded every time a particular page is viewed (whether they refresh the page, or use the back button to view that page again) every page view is counted. Whereas unique page view is only logged once per browsing session. You can also view in-depth information about your pages viewed along with landing pages and exit pages.
The Analytics content tool is important for determining how well your content is working. By looking at your most popular pages, you get a better understanding of what your customers are interested in.

When linked with the average time spent on a page, it can determine how useful they think your content is. You can also see when visitors exit your page, thus helping you understand where you are losing your audience’s attention.

This should have given you a basic understanding into Google Analytics, and how it works. In part 2 of this blog we will have a look at why you should use it and how it can benefit your business!

These are just some of the major sections that are covered within Analytics. If you think you could benefit from using this, give us a call here at FDC Studio Leicester on 01164 244 244 or send us a message and we will be able to provide you with further invaluable insight in how this can help your business and what we offer!

Image courtesy of Google