Website Analytics
Website analytics is all about optimizing your website.
Whether you've got a full e-commerce site with hundreds of products for sale, a lead generation site pushing leads to an offline business, or a blog, news, or content site where you want to sell ad space, optimizing your website based actionable insights from your data should be your #1 goal.
With the popularity of Google Analytics, anybody can now sign up for a free account, install the javascript code on their site, and start logging stats.
But what happens next?
You log in, check your stats the next day and excitedly go through the reports uncovering your visitor numbers, the websites that are referring traffic, keywords that are driving traffic, and a whole host of other fascinating numbers and statistics.
The day after that, you log in again to see if anything new has happened. Your site got a few more visitors, you see more referrals from some other websites, and a visitor from the other side of the world.
You log into your account a few more times over the next couple of weeks. Then a couple of weeks after that. Then you’re checking your stats once a month, if at all.
What happened?
It’s simple. Running reports and looking at the same data day after day means nothing if you’re not using those valuable metrics to improve your website – and impact your bottom line.
Google Analytics gives you insight so that you can TAKE ACTION.
All that data at your fingertips is pretty useless without good analysis. And good analysis is all about gaining actionable insights.
For example, one of our clients operates a chain of automotive service locations and uses their website as a lead generation tool to drive traffic to their offline locations.
Looking at their Google Analytics stats, we noticed that one of their pages was responsible for 71.80% of the entrance bounces for all landing pages. (You can find bounce rate in the “Top Landing Pages” report, under the Content section)
In addition to this, the page had a 35.08% bounce rate – 1 out of every 3 visitors landing on this page was hitting the Back button on their browser, never to be seen again.
By looking at the Content Detail for that page, and segmenting the results by keyword, we found that one particular keyword had an unusually high bounce rate. Looking at the page on the client’s site, something didn’t make sense as the keyword was irrelevant to the page content.
We segmented the keyword data by source, and then medium, and discovered that the traffic was coming from a Google Adwords campaign!
It turned out that one of the people managing the PPC campaign entered the incorrect destination URL for an ad (that problem was quickly fixed). Thankfully for the client, their bid price was fairly low, and they didn’t end up losing as much money as they could have.
This is a an extreme example, but it illustrates the power of Analytics analysis in determining (and preventing) poorly performing traffic.
What are other decisions that Analytics data analysis can inform?
There are plenty. Realistically, each and every website decision you make should be based on insight gained from analysis (and testing – but that’s another topic).
Here are a couple of sample scenarios:
1. You have a shopping cart on your site. From the point where a customer clicks "Checkout" to the end of the sales process (your confirmation / thank you page - the goal URL) takes five steps. With a Goal and Funnel process defined for your checkout process, you can see where potential customers are dropping out of the funnel (in the Funnel Visualization report, under Goals) and make the necessary adjustments.
It turns out that you’re losing 80% of your customers once they hit the “Shipping Information” page, where they see how much you’re charging for shipping. What does that tell you?
If you don’t have your shipping rates available anywhere else on your site for your customers to see, they might just be adding products to their cart and checking out to find out how much you charge… and maybe, you’re charging too much for shipping… =)
Test out displaying your shipping charges on your checkout page. If you find that people drop off right then and there, maybe you are charging too much.
2. You’re hiring a web design company to redesign your website. What design decisions can you make from your current site’s statistics?
Look at your current site’s visitor data (in Analytics’ Visitors section). Looking at the Screen Resolutions report, you find that 30% of your users are still running at a screen resolution of 800x600. Do you want those visitors to have an annoying horizontal scroll bar in their browser because you’re designing for 1024x768? Maybe, maybe not.
It could be possible that those visitors running at 800x600 are in an older demographic and less likely to make a purchase at your site anyway. But how would you know?
If you have a Filter set up for that website profile that segments your data for visitors running at that resolution, you’d look at your Goal Conversions stats for that profile. If it turns out that there are no conversions, you know that you needn’t worry so much about alienating that demographic.
This is just a small sample of how you can (and should) use your Analytics date to inform your website decisions.
Your Google Analytics Process
When it comes to your business’ Analytics process, you’ll need to customize it based on your needs and the needs of your business. What kind of website do you have? When a visitor comes to your site, what is your site’s ultimate goal? Building brand recognition, generating leads, e-commerce sales, minimizing your time spent on customer service?
Based on your site’s goals, you need to define each process that results in achieving a goal and different scenarios that can contribute to increasing your goal conversions.
Once you have your goals and processes defined, come up with a variety of elements you can test and outline your testing strategy. Decide which key Google Analytics reports and metrics will give you the data you require to determine the success of your tests.
Now you’ve outlined your process, and come up with your plan. All you have left to do is take ACTION!
Based on your results, we will make recommendations and conduct SEO tests to see how we can better influence the results.
Contact us today for a free online marketing evaluation!