Gain Actionable Insight with these Google Analytics Tips

4 Minutes

Google Analytics can provide your business with vital marketing information. Take a look at these tips and start using analytics today.

Estimates suggest that as many as 30-50 million websites use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is capable of revealing insights that can help drive your marketing and business investment goals.

Here are a few top tips that you could use to gain actionable insight from Google Analytics to make your website work harder for you.

1. Learn from your site search bar

If you have a search bar on your website, you have the potential to learn exactly what your site users are searching for. This can be valuable in many ways:

How many people are using the site search?

The number of people who use your search bar can give you valuable insight. For example, if a large percentage of users are using site search, then there’s a good chance that your site’s navigation or structure needs to improve. Users can’t naturally find what they are looking for and opt to just use the search bar instead.

Are people searching for one of your products/services heavily?

If so, then you could put these heavily searched products or services on your homepage and make more of a feature of them. This improves user experience and encourages conversion because you have made it easy for users to find what they are looking for.

Maybe you should consider offering all-new products and services

Let’s say you sell sportswear online, but Analytics shows your users are frequently using the search bar to search for trainers, then perhaps it is time to start stocking trainers.

How to Set Up Site Search Tracking

Site search tracking is easy to set up. From your Analytics account admin panel, select Property Settings. From there, all you need to do is enter your query parameter. This can be found in the page URL after you’ve done a search on your website.

Once set up, your captured search data will appear in the Behaviour section of your Reporting tab.

2. Find out if your site is mobile friendly

A significant amount of your search traffic will probably come from searches on a mobile. And if your site is not mobile friendly then more than likely visitors will leave the site. Therefore, it is vital that you make sure your site works on a smartphone.

Analytics allows you to segment all data by mobile users allowing easy comparison to desktop users.

If you go to Audience > Mobile > Overview in Analytics, you’ll find plenty of useful data that can help you determine how mobile friendly your site is.

Time on Site shows you how long a user is spending on your site. This shows how engaged your users are with your web content, or services on mobile. Conversion/purchases show you how many people bought your products, or engaged with your services. One of the most essential metrics on this screen for mobile friendliness, however, is Bounce Rate. Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors to your site who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. This is a clear indicator that the landing page or the site is not user friendly.

3. Find out which channels to invest in

To find out which channels are worth investing in, you need to be tracking sales conversions and desirable actions on-site. Setting up event tracking is a key part of Analytics. Once your event tracking is set up, you can easily see an overview of which channels are performing best via Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. If a certain channel has a high conversion rate, you can start to get a solid idea where to invest your marketing efforts.

4. Get an idea of who’s sending you visitors

Your site might have a constant stream of visitors reaching it from a friendly neighbourhood website and never know it. If you look at your referral traffic in Google Analytics you could find some hidden gems. If another website is a constant source of valuable traffic it’s worth finding out why and doing more of the same.

You could invest in advertising through the neighbourhood website, or suggest they do a guest blog on your site.

5. Track traditional marketing efforts

If you’re doing any marketing that involves a printed web address you could be tracking visitors from this to your website. Looking at visitor numbers and conversions you can find out if this material is doing its job.

The way to set it up is by creating a user-friendly URL e.g. website.com/industryevent and then redirect it to your desired landing page via a URL built in Google’s URL builder. This allows you to track traffic from your offline marketing.

Top Tip! Use URL builder for email marketing too, otherwise it appears as direct traffic and you won’t be able to track the success of your email campaign.

These are just five actionable ways you can use Google Analytics and it really shows just how much knowledge is power. Wish can help you to set up Google Analytics, so if you need any guidance please feel free to get in touch.

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