When is the last time you looked at your Google Analytics?
(You know— that scary dashboard of data and charts and numbers…. that thing!)
There are so many great things you can learn about your audience, website visitors and content on your site just by spending a few minutes checking out Analytics account.
Here are a few suggestions for what to track in Google Analytics on a monthly basis:
Audience
Check out your audience overview. If you’re looking at the past month, change the dates (in the top r right).
Stats we love:
- Users: This tells you how many people were on your site
- New Users: These are people who were never on your site before. This is a great stat to see if you did a big awareness campaign and went out to a new group of people you think might be unfamiliar with you / your brand.
- Sessions: This is how many times these users visited your site. Usually someone comes back more than once. If you publish a lot of new content (blogs) or updates (event schedule changes weekly) you will see this session number grow!
- Bounce Rate: This number is important to watch. You want this as low as possible. Bounce rate means the percentage of people who open your site and leave right away. If you’re running ads and your bounce is really high, you’re probably wasting money. The way to keep this stat low is to make sure the info. you are providing is relevant to someone’s search and easy to read/find/navigate on the page (on ALL devices, especially mobile!)
We’re talking analytics so you’re probably asleep by now, but we love everything in this section! Page views are great to track (especially if you have a lot of blog content) and Avg. session duration (time on site) is equally important.
Top Channels
Head to Acquisition and Overview. This section shows you how people are coming to your site. There are a few main buckets: Social, Organic search, Direct Traffic, Paid search, Email and Referral.
We love them all, but dig into referrals for some really fun info!
Referrals show you the other sites linking to you and sending their visitors over to your website. Some sites may be obvious: Maybe you have a parent brand or organization for your company
But other sites may pop up that you didn’t even know were talking about you! This can be a valuable place to find new resources and organizations or companies to form relationships with!
Conversions
This is the bread and butter of your marketing! Whether you’re tracking form submissions, event sign ups, ticket purchases or product sales, conversions are the end goal! And they should be tracked in Google Analytics!
You can set up a link with your Google Ad campaigns. You can set up GOALS within Google Analytics to track who is coming to the site and filing out a form. If a goal is just to keep people on the site, reading your content and doing research, for 4 minutes, THAT can be a goal you set up and consider a ‘conversion” once completed.
We find that conversions are an area where small businesses and organizations rarely have accurate tracking, and it is so valuable in knowing how your marketing is performing!
Thank you . This is great stuff – reminder and encourager. You are awesome.