Why It's Good To Be A Stats Freak II - Google Analytics
Posted by Ben Williams on Fri, Feb 17, 2012 @ 03:05 AM
Following on from our ‘Why It’s Good To Be A Stats Freak’ blog post, we’re going to talk about Google Analytics today, how we use it, and how you could use it.
Put simply, if you don’t know how many people are visiting your website, how they got to your website, which pages they’re viewing and much more, how are you going to know how to improve your website?
A lot of people, at this point, would say “Well, that’s obvious. I’d change what I think needs changing.”
Wrong.
You change what your visitors think need changing.
Let me give you an example: from Google Analytics, you’ve noticed that people regularly come to one page on your website, from Google, for a specific keyword, but they spend less than a few seconds on said page before leaving your website completely (also known as ‘bouncing’).
Now, what would this tell you? I hope it would tell you that the page is not what the visitor was expecting, so it needs changing to more closely match the keyword.
For example, someone searches “Internet Marketing”, and they click on your link from Google, landing on the page we were just talking about. Except this page is about direct mail, not Internet Marketing.
Now, it’s obvious that this page is going to have a very high bounce rate, as it’s not what the visitor was searching for, so you need to change it to match the keyword.
Obviously this was just an example; chances are if you have a page on your website about Direct Mail, it wouldn’t rank for Internet Marketing, but you get the drift.
So, we personally use Google Analytics not only to tell us the basics; visits, sources, etc. but also like I’ve explained above; to pin-point pages on the website that visitors are either bouncing from, or not spending enough time on.
We would then look at how we could increase engagement, to try and get people to spend longer on the page, and also if the page content matches what the visitor was looking for, which of course depends on the source they originated from.
There are so many ways that you could use Google Analytics, and this post is just a very basic overview of what you can use it for, but use it you must!
Someone once said, if you don’t have a database for your business, you don’t have a business; you have a hobby. I would go as far as to say the same in regards to Google Analytics and your website; if you are serious about your website working for you, and your business, you need Google Analytics (or at least an analytics package of some sorts).
What about you, how do you use Google Analytics? Do you use Google Analytics, or do you prefer a different analytics package?
