Techblog
Gain more marketing insight from your website using Google Analytics
Analytics for your website can tell you more than just the number of people who visited your website. Analytics can provide businesses with more insights that can influence marketing strategies.
SMEs that utilise digital marketing need to spend their marketing dollars wisely as businesses often waste resources on campaigns that do not benefit them. Google Analytics is one tool that can help SMEs understand the effectiveness and impact of marketing activities on and leading to their websites, so that they can optimise marketing budgets. Digital agency APD’s Winnie Pang, a digital performance manager, shares some tips.
What to look out for when using Google Analytics?
Ms Pang said that analytics on a website should not be an afterthought. Instead, they should be used to help SMEs determine their business strategy – especially in the marketing area.
“Analytics is important as it helps monitor the performance of a website, providing us enormous information on the site visitors, such as how they are navigating the site. All the data helps SMEs understand the audience better, and hence, be able to provide customers with what they are looking for,” Ms Pang said.
However, the enormous amount of statistics that Google Analytics provides can be overwhelming at times. There are many metrics that can be measured.
Ms Pang shares the metrics that SMEs should be most concerned with – especially if they are not familiar with Google analytics.
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Who is visiting?
SME owners can also ascertain the demographics of their visitors - like their age, gender and location. These features are found under the “Audience” tab. Google Analytics also shows what visitors are interested in. These interests categories include technophiles, travel loves and music lovers. This helps websites create relevant content that will be engaging to their visitors.
To track the traffic on your site, users will be a key metric to look out for. They include both new and returning users that visit your website. With this metric, businesses can know if people are returning to their website– and this is important. While you can also see where they are coming from, it's the returning visitors that matter.
Meanwhile, sessions refer to the number of interactions a user has with the website. This means that a user can go to a website multiple time within a span of 30 minutes – and this will count as one unique session. A session will count as a new one if it’s past midnight or if the user entered the website through another source or campaign.
Where to find these metrics:
Demographics: Audience > Overview > Demographics > Age or gender
Interests: Audience > Overview > Interests > Overview
Sessions: Audience > Overview
New vs Returning users: Audience > Behaviour > New vs returning users
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What are your customers doing on your website?
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visit the website and leave without viewing any other pages on that same website (entry and exit from the same page). This is a key tool to determine if the content on the website is engaging enough.
Bounce rate should not be confused with exit rate, which refers to the percentage of people who left your website from that page. It must be noted that it does not mean that they landed on that page - they may have viewed more than one page in a session.
Businesses can use bounce rate to decide what kind of content keeps visitors on the website for a longer duration of time and click around. They can do this by clicking on a column to see pages with the highest to lowest bounce rate.
One strategy that SMEs can use is to determine which pages receive the most page views. Then they should improve the bounce rate on those pages. They can do this by ensuring that links to other pages are more visible. Users will then be encouraged to visit other pages of a website, Ms Pang said.
Where to find these metrics?
Bounce rate: Audience > Overview
To rank pages according to bounce rate from highest to lowest: Behaviour > Site content > All Pages. Then click on bounce rate column
Page views: Behaviour > Site Content > All pages
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How much time they're spending on your website?
Google Analytics can also measure the average length of one session. Google analytics can give businesses the average session duration for visitors coming into the website from various sources - whether it's search engine or social media. Usually, a longer average session duration time indicates that the visitors of the website are more engaged with the content.
Where to find these metrics:
Individual traffic sources: Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Source/Medium
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Where are your visitors coming from?
Businesses can also isolate certain statistics and look at demographics or traffic sources while analysing the average session duration. This can help businesses strategise especially when they are creating campaigns. For example, if people coming in from Facebook are spending a longer time on the site then more effort should be spent on crafting Facebook campaigns. It can also help you determine if you are reaching your target audience.
Ms Pang said that analytics helps businesses understand their audience as well as behaviour on a much deeper level. Analytics also tells you if your website design and if your content is attracting the right audience. Essentially, website design, content, SEO and analytics all go hand in hand.
For example, if analytics show that the bounce rate at a particular page is very high, then the content should be tweaked accordingly. Analytics can show a customer’s journey on the page so it is important to review every step of that journey and take measures to improve the experience of the customer, Ms Pang said.
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Google Analytics help SME make better decisions on how to create their website content.
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The key terms to look out for on Google Analytics are Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration.
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You can isolate certain statistics on Google Analytics like demographics and traffic source based on average session duration. This can help you better plan your campaign.