How to Use Google Analytics to Plan your Online Marketing Strategy
I really like Google Analytics, yes it does have its flaws and yes sometimes I get very frustrated when it doesn’t work properly. However it’s an excellent, free tool which is easy to setup and does exactly what its meant to – provide you with information on what people are doing on your website. We use it a lot at Pin Digital and I’ve been looking at it even more lately as a result of passing my Google Analytics exam (sorry had to get that in!) and discovering loads of new things and tweaks you can do to get more data from Analytics.
But getting loads of cool data isn’t enough – anyone can sit in front of the Analytics control panel and read stats, thinking to themselves “yep, visitors are up, pageviews are up, all the blue lines are up, I’m happy, job done!” Erm… no!
The real work comes in finding out why you are seeing this data and how you use it to further improve your website and ultimately your conversions.
So I’ve put together 5 ways to action the data you see in Google Analytics to improve your website further.
1. Taking Advantage of Current Organic Traffic
What most people do…
Many people will look at the top 10 keywords that are sending them traffic at the moment, see some of their main keywords in there and think no more of it.
What you should do…
Check your rankings for these keywords – if you are getting traffic for keywords ranking outside the top 3 then imagine how much extra you’d get if you were in the top 3. You are already ranking for this keyword so just a few on-page tweaks and a few links may be enough to give it a nudge up a few places.
Quick note - There are some advanced filters that you can apply to your profiles which will tell you what position of the Google Search results someone clicked on to get to your website which will save you doing this manually. However thats a post for another day as it is pretty advanced and beyond the scope of this post!
2. Using Site Search to Better Serve your Visitors
Analytics has a cool feature where it can track what people are searching for on your website. This is very valuable information. It can be used in a number of ways to improve your website and help people find what they are looking for.
What most people do…
Surprisingly most people do not even get this cool feature setup! Its not that difficult trust me.
What you should do…
Take the most popular searches on the site and run them yourself, are the results relevant to the user? Is the most relevant result at the top? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then you need to look at how your website search engine works. At Pin Digital we are currently improving our on-site search engine to use a points system so we look at a variety of factors to determine which page to show – with a few tweaks we can easily show the user the page most relevant to them.
I’ve seen some website search engines that use the META keywords tag, if this is how yours works – add popular keywords in this section.
By doing this you are increasing the chances of a searcher converting into a customer.
3. Find out which Pages your Visitors do not Like
One of the most popular questions we are asked by clients in relation to Google Analytics is “what does bounce rate mean?”. Since Google defined this it has been much easier however it can be hard to explain that it isn’t a strict metric to be followed.
For example a bounce rate for a blog home page can be higher than average because most of the content is visible straight away, the user doesn’t have to click through to read the latest posts. Unless of course you only show them as snippet as we have done ;)
What most people do…
Look at the average bounce rate of their whole website and hope it goes down each month.
What you should do…
Drill down deeper into your pages and find out which pages have higher bounce rates than the site average. Analytics has a cool feature where you can compare the bounce rates of various pages and see if they are above or below average.
With this data you can take a closer look at the pages which have an above average bounce rate and see what it is about these pages that people do not like.
4. Finding Top Pages on your Website
There are some good tools out there to find out which pages on your website are strongest, there is the SEOmoz top pages tool as well as some advanced Google query searches you can do. However Analytics also has a method too.
What most people do…
Look at referring sites to see who is sending them traffic, visit these sites and that’s it.
What you should do…
Drill down further in your reports and see which landing pages have the most views from referring websites. This gives you a good indicator of which pages are most popular on other peoples websites and therefore may carry most weight with search engines. Also if these are very popular landing pages, you need to make sure these pages are as optimised as possible.
5. Improving your Top Revenue Sources
This is aimed at Ecommerce websites that have Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking setup. This is a feature that lets Analytics access and display revenue from your website and give you an idea of how this revenue was generated.
What most people do…
Look at their sources of revenue to see how much money they are making from Google, Yahoo, shopping sites etc.
What you should do…
Sort your revenue sources by “per visit value”. This will tell you what each visitor from a certain source was worth. You need to put these figures into context a little, for example I’m currently looking at my report which is telling me the highest visitor value, but this was one visitor from one website who spent a lot of money. So not the most reliable stat.
You need to cross reference this stat with number of visits. If there are a decent amount of visits plus a high per visitor value. Then you know that you need to improve the traffic from this source as much as possible. One example could be if a referring site is sending you good quality traffic with an advertising banner in their sidebar, see if there are other positions available on the page to improve the prominence of the banner.
Conclusion
There are loads of stats available to you, but just looking at them isn’t enough. You need to use the data to plan future marketing strategies and improve current ones. If you do make changes to your website or marketing campaigns – make sure you closely monitor the results so that you can see if there has been a positive effect or not.