Inside Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a comprehensive tool to better measure and manage the web metrics of your website. More importantly, the software is free, making it easily accessible for the largest of enterprises to the smallest of businesses, and even for individual users with personal websites or blogs. According to Smashing Magazine, Google Analytics can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, AdSense and emails and much, much more. Google Analytics offers a wide breathe of metrics and reports, more than 85 actually. But viewing and understanding the numbers is only the first step. Taking that data, synthesizing it into useful reports, and drawing conclusions is a priority for marketers to help identify the return on investment (ROI) and measure overall web success.

Bounce Rate and Pages Per Visit

Although there are some extravagant reports within GA, the basic metrics can often help draw the most obvious and important conclusions about a website. Bounce rate reveals the number of visitors who arrived on the site and immediately left. This gives the website owner a clear indication that something is wrong with the site. The user obviously landed on the page and quickly noticed it did not have what he or she was looking for and went elsewhere to meet that need. Similarly, pages per visit means that users either spent a great deal of time drilling down and viewing many pages or they were not content and viewed few or even one page. Ideally, marketers want bounce rates to be low and pages per visit to be somewhat high (if it is too high, visitors could be getting lost). Based on my personal analytics, my bounce rate is high at 72.73 and my pages per visit is low at 1.86. So how do we fix this? Angel West at PCWorld mentions several ways to learn from these metrics. If your usability issues are taken care of, then you should tweak marketing copy and graphics to help customers find what they need quickly.Content should be clear, concise, and paired with exciting graphics that point visitors to what they want. Long, ranting copy and a lack of attractive graphics will keep your bounce rates high. She also goes on to say that carefully identifying keywords and acting on the results is a key strategy to helping improve bounce rate and pages per visit.

Visitor Traffic and Keywords

Google Analytics does a wonderful job at explaining where your visitors are coming from. This comes in handy when executing social media efforts, performing search engine optimization (SEO) or using Google AdWords. With social media metrics, you can see how many users are coming from these channels so you know which ones to focus most heavily upon. The visitor figures also help you understand what web surfers are typing into Google to find your site organically. If users are coming to you with keyword strings that are not necessarily related to your site’s content, you know there is a problem. Use keywords within your content and tag your posts accordingly with more strategic language that helps users who are actually interested in your material find your site more quickly. Keyword identification is also vital to your pay-per-click (PPC) success. With a monetary investment in AdWords, you must focus on which ads are bringing in users and which ones are failing. These keywords help you know what should be used in ad copy and which ones should not. Identifying keywords from your own internal search engine is also vitally important. SEOMoz has a great byte of information on the importance of this metric. You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website. Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales. These users who are already on your page know what they are looking for and they are telling you through the search engine. Make sure to take this information into heavy consideration into your collective marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, all the users to my current blog have come from social media, directly, or from other blogs. At this point, I have no visitors arriving organically and I am not using AdWords. As a result, my keyword report is empty. However, once this begins to populate, I will need to pay close attention to my strongest and weakest keywords to better improve my post content. Rachael Gearson at Mashable mentions the perks to Google’s keyword cloud report, which generates a word cloud of the keywords bringing users into your site. Rather than viewing a long list of keywords to spot trends, users can now evaluate a keyword cloud. This cloud makes it easy to visualize top keywords based on different user-selected criteria, including visits, bounce rates and pages per visit. Marketers should be keen on this tool to more quickly identify which keywords work best and then incorporate those into messaging on the site and other brand channels.

Analysis

Data without analysis are only numbers. Anyone can run a report but the talent and skill comes with digesting that information and putting it into actionable items. By doing so, marketers can work with the development and design teams to make the necessary changes to improve the site and eventually lead to a more positive experience for users and more success for the brand. Some additionally changes I could immediately make to my personal blog, based on the metrics I am seeing from GA include:

- Add more graphics and video. This will help users become more engaged, stay on my site longer, and decrease my bounce rate.

- Build a larger library of content with internal links within each new post, directing users to archived posts. This will keep users on the site longer and boost my pages per visit statistic.

- Install a site search feature and monitor search strings. The keywords from these searches are direct indications of what users want. Analyze these and respond accordingly by way of new products, features or more targeted content.

- Adjust headlines and incorporate tags. These changes will enhance search engine optimization and boost my Google rankings to hopefully attract more organic traffic.

- Begin to utilize AdWords, Facebook Ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets. Users are having a hard time finding my site. By spending some ad dollars, users can find their way through paid search and social media advertisements.

Conclusion

Traditionally, it was a mere guessing game to measure website success. Traffic and clicks could only offer so much insight. With the advent of more thorough tools, marketers have been able to get a better grasp on how useful a website is and how much value it serves to one’s target audience. Google Analytics remains the king of website analytics. It provides a full set of detailed metrics, it integrates with third party systems to make tracking easy and comprehensive, and it is free. Marketers must learn the variety of metrics that Google Analytics offers and listen to what those metrics are saying. By having a solid grasp on this rich system, and learning the best ways to make intelligent marketing decisions from that data, websites can consistently be improving to better serve end users.