Analysing your website traffic with Google Analytics
Our free website audit service is proving very popular with businesses who have paid a lot for a website but feel that they aren't getting the return on investment they were led to expect by their website designer.
Yet, when we ask these customers how much traffic their website is getting, the answer is often a variation of "I don't have a clue". Even more scary, we even run into website developers who give the same answer, but we'll save that for a blog post all of its own.
It seems obvious to us, but if you don't know how much traffic your website is getting, how you can you measure how successful it is? Of course, website traffic is only part of the story - you also have to convert that traffic to sales or leads - but if you don't know anything about the people visiting your website, you haven't got a hope of improving your conversion rates.
Any web development company worth its salt will provide some kind of traffic analysis tool. Many have proprietary tools that are designed to work with their own website platform. Yet the one of the best and most powerful website analytics tool around is a free tool called Google Analytics.
You can set up Google Analytics by signing up with Google, and then adding a small piece of website code that Google supplies to the end of each page on your website. Then, each time a visitor views a page on your website, Google tracks information about that visitor, such as:
- which country they're from
- what time of day they visited
- how they found the page (via a search engine, a link on another website, or by typing the address directly into their web browser)
- which keywords they used, if they came via a search engine
- Which pages they visited
- How long they stayed on the site
- Whether they took an action while on the site, such as filling out your contact form or signing up for your newsletter.
This list is almost endless, and it can take quite a long time to get to grips with everything that Google Analytics has to offer. But it's worth taking the time if you're serious about improving the results your website generates.
Here are some practical examples of how you could use Google Analytics:
- For the people who submitted your contact form, you can work out which keywords they used to find your site. A pattern here could mean its worth focusing more on optimising your website for those keywords, since they're obviously bringing warm prospects to your website.
- You could review the bounce rate (i.e. the percentage of people who leave your site without visiting any pages other than the page they arrived on) to see whether there are any patterns. It could be that people using certain keywords always bounce. It could be other people using different keywords never bounce.
- You could work out how many people get to your contact page and then leave your site without completing it. This might point to a problem with the format of your contact page - it could be turning people off just as they're about to make an enquiry.
The great thing about Google Analytics is that there is almost no limit to the data you can extract from the visitors coming to your site. All you have to do is figure out the patterns and work out how to leverage it to your advantage. It may seem complex at first but it's worth the effort - assuming you're serious about getting more business from your website.
One final comment. A lot of website designers who use Google Analytics on their clients' websites will set up the account under their own name, and schedule Google Analytics to email the client a weekly or monthly summary. If that sounds like your situation, you should talk to the designer about getting access to the raw data - or even set up your own Google Analytics account and ask your website designer to use your code instead of theirs.
If you need help getting Google Analytics set up on your website, or you want help understanding how to read the results, why not get in touch?
