Looking after your business practically implies taking care of your website. Considering the fact that your website is probably the most important source of your overall income, it’s no wonder why so much attention is given to this online representation of your business. The fact is you can’t do enough, and that you should always look new ways to manage your website with ease, and increase traffic simultaneously. There are many different pieces of software that can help you with this matter, but the free version of Google Analytics is perhaps your best option – it offers you valuable insight into everything that’s happening on your website, and it suggests tips and tricks on how to make things better. You’re probably already familiar with the basics, but let’s take a look at what kind of power is standing behind its capable tools.
The Bigger Picture (Long Term Statistics)
When you enter Google Analytics in order to check out statistics and results, the default settings automatically show you data from the last month. This type of info is quite useful, but if you’ve had a website for a longer period of time, you should also check out other options, and see what has been going on in the last couple of months or even a year. These long term patterns can show you valuable data that you can use to bring new visitors to your website, which is really the point. All growth methods you apply to your already existing strategies can only increase your online performance, and accordingly, your incomes.
Enter, Bounce and Exit Rates
Keeping track of what your visitors find useful should be one of your priorities. There are three different aspects that Google Analytics enables you – Entrances, Bounce Rates and Exit Percentage. Being able to see this type of data clearly obviously impacts the course of your future strategies related to increasing traffic.
When it comes to Entrances, you should know that this column is quite simple – it shows you a neat list of every visitor who entered your website, and that particular page they’ve visited. Whether it’s your home page, a post or a video, you’re able to see exactly what caught their attention.
On the other hand, Bounce Rate shows you the list of visitors who entered only one page and left your website without checking out the rest of it. Similar to this one, Exit Percentage lists those visitors who entered your website and left after visiting a certain page, without taking into consideration whether or not that visitor previously browsed another page or several of them.
The fact is that majority of visitors simply enter your website to learn one piece of info they are in need of, and leave right after. However, if you study your numbers carefully, you’ll be able to increase relevance of the most popular content, and thus increase the traffic itself.
Keyword Significance
One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is what brought your users to your website? The percentage of visitors who found your website by using a search engine, no matter how big or small that number is, typed certain keywords you need to pay a close attention to.
By using Google Analytics and their section dedicated to analytics, you’ll be able to track and study general behavior of each user, and find out the exact keywords that led them to your page, learn whether or not they visited other pages as well, and use that precious piece of info to upgrade the quality of your content.
The secret is in being precise, and finding a way to distinguish your business and become a serious competitor in your niche. By using complex multi-word keywords that refer to specific items or terms, you’ll be able to rank yourself quite high and probably get to the first page of Google search, all thanks to specific targeting that your audience will find more than helpful.
Traffic Assessment
There are more than a few ways to use pieces of info you learn thanks to Google Analytics to increase the overall traffic on your website. For example, by studying Visitor Flow Charts, you’ll be able to see different paths of visitor movements on your website. This might be a lot to take in at once, because a chart is a bit hard to interpret when you take a look at it for the first time, but I’m sure it will become clearer after a certain period of time. By having this kind of knowledge, you’ll be able to see how long users stay on a certain page, what’s the next one they visit and basically, what keeps them on your website.
The second part of studying the behavior of your visitors is by paying close attention to their engagement. This aspect of behavior is based on duration – according to Google Analytics, group of visitors that are classified as engaged stay on your website longer than 60 seconds. This data is in the form of a table, and you’re able to see the exact number of visitors and an approximate timeframe they spent on your pages. Thanks to it, you’ll be able to determine what makes them stick around, and subject the rest of your content to the most popular topics.
Traffic Handling
Increasing traffic on your website is one things, but working on its capacity and the ability to withhold a certain amount of traffic. It’s quite simple really – if visitors encounter a loading problem, they’ll move on to the next best thing sooner than you think. If you visit Page Timing section, you’ll be able to see how much time is necessary for a certain page to load. These details can be more than helpful when it comes to determining whether or not you need to put in additional effort into working on the overall speed of your website. Face it – patience isn’t a virtue of your visitors you can count on.
Social Platforms Research
Determining your sources of traffic should be one of your priorities. Considering the fact that popularity of social media is only increasing, working on the content of your shares, tweets or other kind of posts needs your close attention.
Your starting point here should be an objective estimation of the attractiveness of your landing page – if it’s outdated, vast or made according to the trends which were popular several years ago, you need to change it as soon as possible. You should also have in mind that the number of visitors that use smartphones or tablets to be active on social platforms or simply browse the internet is constantly going up, so your whole website should be responsive and mobile-friendly.
By using Google Analytics – Social Visitor Flow and Social Network Referrals specifically – you’ll be able to learn about the numbers of visitors that are brought to you thanks to social platforms, and study their behavior on your website. Obviously, this will show you the good and the bad sides of your strategies, and how to improve them.
Numbers don’t lie. Learning how to interpret all info brought to you by Google Analytics shouldn’t take too much of your time, and knowing how to use that knowledge in order to improve the overall performance of your website should be your next step.
