For small businesses working to build an online presence through website, social media or email marketing, it’s a MUST to track analytics. Analytics is the place to find out how things are working and if customers are responding to your posts, campaigns and ads. Either you or the company you’ve hired should be reviewing your analytics monthly!
Below are three basic analytics you can EASILY track with Google Analytics. Google does go very in-depth and can be confusing, so let’s cover some easy numbers to pay attention to. Find your options on the left side of your Google Analytics page and look for the titles covered below.
AUDIENCE
Audience shows you how many visitors are new vs. returning. Choose dates you wish to view data from in the top right corner to analyze specific timeframes. For example, if you’re running a two-week promotion to attract new clients, this will show you how many NEW users clicked through to your website during that two-week timeframe. Or, if you posted a new blog series, it would be helpful to know how many users came through and then returned to check out the continuing series.
The average session means how long a person stayed on your website. You’ll see by the graphic below that you can break the audience down into several categories such as location, interests, and demographics.
For now, let’s focus on the basic audience numbers so you can see how easy it is to check your new and returning user numbers. A major thing you’ll want to pay attention to is the Bounce Rate. A rising bounce rate likely means your homepage is boring or off-putting – users are clicking away quickly. Keeping this low will mean your users are sticking around your site and finding what they’re looking for. Below is what your Google Analytics will look like:
ACQUISITION
Acquisition is a fantastic place to find out WHERE users are finding you! This is also the place you can find out if you have some bad referral traffic/spam traffic. There are easy ways to set up filters to weed out the junk traffic, but they change often and can skew your numbers. For now, focus on what you can track here. Web traffic comes from four main searches:
- Paid – a user that has come from a paid ad via Google Ads, a paid ad service that puts your company in the top 3 placement on a search and the company pays per click through for that visitor.
- Display – another option/ad-on with Google Ads, that have you appear on outside sides such as Kijiji and Amazon promoting your company.
- Organic – all traffic coming from search engine results – it can be organic, unpaid or paid. SEO (search engine optimization) would be a common result for this traffic and does not cost anything when a user clicks to visit.
- Referral – a recommendation from one site to another. For example, a backlink where you were listed as a guest blogger with a link to your site where the user clicked-through.
- Direct – someone typed in your website or clicked a link in an email address signature, etc, fairly self-explanatory
- Social – any traffic from social media. You can click through and analytics will break down the actual platforms you have traffic from. This is a massive help in figuring out which platforms to focus on and what people are responding to
BEHAVIOR
Finding out the behavior of your user is key for promotions and marketing. For example, if you’re trying to promote a blog but all your traffic is to your home or contact page, you can see that no one is visiting the blog. Behavior will show you your pages and the number of visitors that clicked onto each.
Click on the page listed to get more information to assist you in your marketing efforts. Find out how long the user stayed on the page and which users were unique (new) visitors to that page. This section of Analytics is helpful especially to track the pages that are of most interest to your users.
Analytics Measurement Calgary
With these helpful tips, you can figure out the basics and continue to revamp your current website and marketing plans. Tracking and monitoring your analytics is KEY to success – don’t spend your hard-earned marketing budget blindly!
Analytics should be your marketing bread and butter and we can help!
Email us at info@metron.ca to get started!