By Jake Wharton, Marketing.
Google Analytics is an indispensable tool for any website. Measuring your website’s performance couldn’t be any simpler. It allows you to track very important data such as views, engagement, where your traffic comes from and much more useful statistics.
Knowing this information is advantageous to optimising your website and to create content that will increase the popularity of your domain. Today we will be discussing the basics of Google Analytics.
This video will give you an introduction to how Analytics can help your digital marketing.
Measuring your Website’s Performance
Is Google Analytics simple to use?
Yes! Once you know what the key metrics represent, you can quickly understand what is going on. We’ll be talking about key elements of Google Analytics after we show you how to set it up.
How to set Google Analytics up for your website
- Set up a Google Analytics Account here: https://www.google.com/analytics/#?modal_active=none
- Add your website into it. Go to the Admin tab, and select Create new property. Then select Website and enter your website URL.
- Now you need to add the analytics tracking code to your website. In the admin tab, click on tracking info and click on the tracking code. Copy the code and paste it before the closing head tag on each page. (This means you want to paste the code before this: </head>).
The key elements
Page Views: The amount of page views on your site will increase in proportion to the numbers shown in the amount of users you have. This represents how many pages have been viewed by users on your site.
Users: The number of different individuals that visit your site.
Sessions: A session is a period of time in which a user is on your website. The Sessions element can be larger than the Users element because Users can visit your website more than once.
Bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a page of your website and then leave (such as pressing the back button) without clicking on anything else or navigating to a different page of your site. High bounce rates aren’t fantastic as you want the users to be on your site for as long as possible.
Acquisition: Knowing how many users visit your site is important, but even more so is knowing where they come from. On the side control panel, click on Acquisition and then Overview.
Avg. session duration: This is the average time a user spends on your website.
Ways of improving your site based on the Key elements.
Bounce rate: If you have a high bounce rate, this means a lot of people aren’t engaging with your site and leaving it. To improve the bounce rate and to keep people engaging with your site more, add call to actions. These could be various buttons on your site with an exciting proposition. Buttons like ‘Click here to see our most popular blog of 2016’, or ‘click here to download our free eBook’ are some examples.
Page Views: You can also increase your amount of page views by simply creating more engaging content for your users and using more powerful call to actions. This way they are more likely to move through your site rather than just visit one page.
Acquisition: If you know where your main source of traffic is coming from, perhaps you could work on that channel more? For example, if the majority of your users are coming to your website from Facebook, perhaps you could consider Facebook advertisements to increase this.
Users: You should always strive to keep the amount of users as high as possible. The more users you have the more likely you are to complete a goal. Don’t forget however, that you only want the right kind of people to your site. Your target audience.
Avg. session duration: If your average session duration is slow, perhaps it could be you don’t have enough content on your website. To increase it make your website more appealing to stay on longer. This also links to SEO, so it’s wise to try and increase it. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyiikzjg9a0&t=81s)
Thinking about driving traffic to your website through social media?
Read this start up guide to social media for businesses.