Understanding your website traffic yields huge benefits for your business and can help you better connect with your audience. Having a web presence on the internet is simply one part of the equation. You need to have a solid comprehension of the way your visitors are interacting with your content. Furthermore it’s important to use such aggregated data for your analysis and monetization. Why? Google Analytics can help you find important information about your website including Traffic Sources, Content, & Goals.
Google Analytics is a web-based application tool that lets its user monitor, analyze, and monetize behavioral occurrences and changes on their website. A sophisticated analytical tool that breaks down activity of your visitors and lets you identify new trends and patterns. Amongst all others tools as such this is probably one of the most advanced and easy to use – and it’s FREE. There are various segments and metrics available at a user’s disposal here although perhaps one too many for a novice. If you’re new to using this amazing web-based tool I’d suggest that you dive into the Google Analytics Help Articles before you do anything else.
Getting To Know Google Analytics – Individual Reports
There literally over 80 different reports that you can use make work for you and available via Google Analytics to help you monitor your website’s performance. Currently you will find 5 different main segments that Google Analytics offers for monitoring of your website’s performance. One of the newest ones that was added recently and currently still in Beat is the Intelligence reports.
- Visitors – this particular report section consists of information about your visitors in general and the way they are viewing your website. There are various metrics available at your disposal here such as Benchmarking, Map Overlay, News vs Returning Visitors, Different Languages, Visitor Trending, Visitor Loyalty, Different Browsers, Network Properties, and available User Defined option to customize your report.
- Traffic Sources – identify the various online and offline traffic sources that have sent traffic to your website’s domain. Find out which of these are driving the most amount of traffic to your website and spot new trends and patterns provided by the enhanced graphs. Some of the metrics available in this segment consist of Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, All Traffic Sources, Keyword, Google AdWords (Campaigns, Keywords, Ad Versions), & more.
- Content – these particular set of reports offer an insight on the content of your website and how each visitor interacted with it. Identify the Time On Page each visitor has spent in addition to Top Pages, Exit Pages, Content Drilldown, Site Overlay and Much More. If you’re interested in analyzing fully your content while drilling down deep enough to user activity than this is where you’ll find all of this information. When it comes to optimizing your website for more organic visibility and contextual targeting the information found here can come quite handy.
- Goals – identifying individual goals for your website should be an important part of your ongoing online marketing activities. Furthermore you should also establish and outline a clear conversion process that will drive revenue to your business. This particular section of Google Analytics gives you the ability to track your website goals and gain a clear understanding of your conversions. Reports such as Total Conversions, Conversion Rate, Goal Verification, Reverse Goal Path, Goal Abandoned Funnels, and Funnel Visualization will put you in closer touch with your visitors. It will also help you make necessary adjustments to your conversion process via your website resulting in higher Conversions & Conversion Rate Ratio.
- E-Commerce – if you have a shopping cart or an online store in need of aggregating the information from it then Google Analytics is an ideal tool for just that. It’s important to understand your ROI and e-commerce websites are nothing shy of that either. As a matter of fact each e-commerce website should be utilizing an analytical tool that provides data about its sales. Google Analytics for e-commerce offers reporting on Total Revenue, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Product Performance (Overview, SKUs, Categories), Transactions, Visits To Purchase, & Days To Purchase. As an e-commerce website owner I’m more than positive that this type of information will come in handy when identifying the source of your revenue.
Whether you’re new to Google Analytics or an advanced user I strongly recommend that you engage in aggressive monitoring of your web traffic. I hope that the information provided here has helped you gain a baseline understanding of how you can take full advantage of an analytical tool for a better understanding of your website traffic.
Stay tuned for a Part 2 of this series coming soon.