6 Things You Should Never Miss In Google Analytics

Digital marketing entails the use of a broad spectrum of tools that help your campaign succeed. One such tool is Google Analytics. It is google’s web analytics tool that keeps track of a number of things on your website.

Google analytics is an essential tool for businesses, but it is underused. Many companies have yet to get into its depth and core uses for their business. These businesses need to realize the importance of analytics. Despite being the most popular web analytics service, too many of its features are still almost invisible to many.

What does google analytics do?

To start with, google analytics helps you keep track of traffic on your site. It is also essential in getting insights into user behaviour on your website as well as how they use it. There are many aspects of digital marketing that you can track using analytics. For instance your ROI, blindly launching campaigns without monitoring their Return on investment can hurt your business. When you monitor ads, you find out which ads have a more extensive reach and better response.

Benefits of using analytics

To mention a few, google analytics enables you to measure the performance of your campaigns. You can check for their collective performance or individual performance. This will, in turn, help you know which ads to focus on and push and which ads need refining.

Additionally, you can also track trends on your website. For example, you can find out what time of day has more visitors. This can inform your ad placement, format and the time you publish new content. Remember, with analytics; you’ll even find out what website visitors are looking at on your site.

Furthermore, google analytics will help you keep historical traffic trends which means you can study past patterns to optimize your existing campaigns.

6 things to look at in google analytics

With knowledge of what it is and how it helps your internet marketing efforts, some of the things to look at using analytics include:

1. Site content

Having a lot of traffic to your website is great but knowing what these visitors look at on your site is better. Here’s why, your website consists of several pages with different information, it is, therefore, essential to know what information visitors are after.

Tracking your site’s content will help you gauge which web pages are performing and which ones need optimization. Measuring site content entails looking at which pages get the most visitors and also where your visitors spend the most time on your website. This can help you improve the quality of your content.

2. Session duration

It is not enough for people to click on ads or visit your site if they don’t stay. The amount of time a website visitor spends on your site will tell you how useful and valuable your information is. If most people leave after barely a second, your site needs optimization.

The time on site of your consumers is indicative of a good website with helpful content. People tend to lose interest very fast if they’re not getting what they want. However, it is important to note that tracking time on site with analytics can be tricky. This is mainly because it’s hard to tell when a visitor opens a new tab.

3. Bounce rate

Another key metric to track is the bounce rate. This is the number of visitors who leave your site without exploring your other pages. Now, bounce rate can be a tad confusing to track but generally, if your site has a 50% and below rate, then your site is okay. However, anything above that is indicative of a problem with your website.

Bounce rate helps you gauge if there are any setup or user experience problems. It can help you figure out which page needs optimization more than others.

4. Traffic source

With Google Analytics, you can track where your traffic is coming from which in turn helps you boost your marketing efforts at the source. Google analytics will automatically measure:

•    Direct traffic

These are the users who already know your firm and will key in your URL to visit your site.

•    Social traffic

These are also referral users who find your URL from social sites, blogs or other websites.

•    Search traffic

If users found you through Google search, then they’re your search traffic.

The primary importance of measuring traffic source is to help you know which marketing channels are working for your business. This enables you to optimize your strategy by focusing on the successful channels and minimizing efforts on the less effective outlets.

5. Visitors

This is your actual traffic. It’ll help you understand how popular your site is. Tracking the number of visitors to your site is more effective when done long term. In other words, monitoring whether your site gains or loses visitors over time will help you gauge its performance. With Google analytics, this is easy as pie.

6. Conversion rate

Traffic to your site is a good sign, but low conversion rates are alarming. Measuring conversion rate is like tracking the health of your site and your marketing efforts. If your site content is not getting people to convert, then you have a real issue.

The best part is that you track the conversion rate of each campaign meaning you get to know where to shift your focus and which campaign ships to abandon.

To sum up

Without actionable insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns, your business is likely to stagnate or decline. Therefore, google analytics is fundamental as it helps to direct your attention to areas that are performing and those that aren’t.