Tip of the month: Get to grips with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is both your best and scariest friend!

In a marketing sense, it can give you an insanely detailed view as to how your audience finds and uses your website; giving insight into the most effective (and ineffective) pages, allowing you to tweak and tailor them until you get the formula just right.

It offers a detailed look at your audience’s location, gender, likes, dislikes and a host of other information that as the website owner, is extremely useful, but as a member of society is pretty terrifying! (How do they know you enjoy badminton on a Wednesday and dislike films about cats? It’s enough to make you start wearing a tin foil hat and cowering under the desk, I can tell you!)

However, as a marketing agency, this information is invaluable to us. We can analyse the information, compare it year on year, and make sure that the site is performing to the best of its (and our) abilities.

We recently hosted a Google Analytics course here at Fig, where we explained the benefits of using the system, and presented a ‘how-to’ session to show attendees how to use it, what the main sections were used for, and the best practice to employ to get the most out of it.

If you weren’t there, here’s a quick recap of what was said…

Bounce Rate

A ‘bounce’ is any action that takes a user off your website, whether it’s clicking a link to a different site, closing the page, typing in another URL or closing the window within 3 seconds of arriving on it.

As a rule of thumb, you should be aiming for a bounce rate of less than 40% per page. Anything over 50% should ring alarm bells. Why are more than over half the people who access this page so keen to leave so quickly? What improvements can you make to the page to encourage them to spend more time on it? Is it loading too slowly? Is the content not quite right? Whether it’s using more engaging imagery, editing the text, or moving the call to action above the fold, it’s definitely worth tweaking the page to try to lower your bounce rate and keep your web users engaged.

Sessions

A ‘session’ is classed as any site interaction over 5 seconds. You can see how many times your website has been visited, and the average length of time that a visitor spends on there. If it’s not very long at all, you should probably be asking yourself why.

Users

This is the number of individuals that have visited your website. Even if someone has visited your site every day for two years, it would only show up as one unique user. Obviously with this segment, the bigger the number the better! You should be looking for an increase in users year on year.

Page Views

This section of Google Analytics tells you how many times each particular page has been visited, and is unlimited. Just one user can account for hundreds and hundreds of views if they constantly revisit the site. Your home page is normally the page with the largest number of page views, but you can see the page views for every single page of your website. Compare the bounce rate for each page for an overview of your most popular pages.

Referrals

This segment shows you which external sites refer the most web traffic your way. Seeing where web users come from gives you an indication of the other types of websites they enjoy visiting, and can help to give you a fully rounded overview of your audience’s likes and dislikes.

Google Analytics will also show you which type of browsers your audience are using as well as which types of devices they are using. Therefore, if the majority of your web users are viewing on mobiles and smartphones, is it worth developing a mobile site, or at least attributing a budget to making sure your website is responsive so that it performs well for your majority audience?

On top of this, Google Analytics also gives you information on the location of your audience, as well as their interests, so if you’re looking at digital advertising, you can tailor the advert to specifically target your audience and place it on the types of sites and platforms they visit the most. (Like we said, it’s pretty terrifying when you think about it!)