10-SPACES we BLOG

In this blog post you’ll learn two things about Google Analytics quickly: The questions you should ask yourself about effectiveness of your website’s traffic. And which reports will give you the answers to your questions.

Whether for e-commerce, blog, or corporate marketing every live website should have Google Analytics (GA) installed. Usually it’s not a hard sell to get clients on Google Analytics because its free. Plus set up is free and easy. Just copy/paste the javascript above the close body tag of all your pages. Simple enough right?

It’s straightforward until you start trying to get meaning from the reports. Most clients I deal with get a little overwhelmed at the Analytics reports. It’s not that they don’t understand them. Since they’re off running their businesses, they just don’t have time to figure out which stats on Google Analytics are the most important to pay attention to.

Here’s ‘x’ questions you should ask yourself about your website’s traffic. Since 10-Spaces focuses on pay-per-click (PPC) optimization, I’m making the assumption your using PPC to drive your traffic and you and I are review what improvements we should make to the PPC campaigns. You’ll use Google Analytics to get to the bottom of it.

Here’s some questions you should be asking when it comes to using Google Analytics to improve your PPC ads.

1. How many visitors clicked on your PPC ads?
2. Did your visitors stay on your site long enough to be considered a “session” by Google Analytics?
3. What percentage of your visitors clicked on your ads more than once?
4. How many visitors we’re new visitors?
5. What percentage visited the site more than once?
6. How many pages did your visitors look at while they were on the site?
7. How much time did your visitors spend on the site (i.e. number of minutes)?

By starting with the right questions, it makes find the answers that much easier. Primarily because you now know what you’re looking for. It then just becomes a matter of locating the right GA reports. You can use Google Analytics to get more sophisticated, but I’d suggest ignoring most reports for now. Just get when you need to get started.

Now you can visit your Google Analytics account and focus on just 5 simple metrics. You can view a more detailed description of each of these reports if you’d like.

1. Visit vs. Clicks
2. New Vs. Returning Visitor
3. Average Page Views Per Visitor
4. Average Time On Site
5. Bounce Rate

Don’t ignore your Google Analytics account because it’s features are a little overwhelming. Even though there’s lots of things you could report on, for now just focus on these 5 reports. The data updates every 24 hours so you only have to check it once a day. If you haven’t already, sign up for a free Google Analytics account and set it up on your website.

Each day just do one thing for me: take a few notes about which of your PPC ads are bringing in qualified traffic and which pages are keeping people on the site.

In upcoming blog posts I’ll go into more detail about improvements you can make to your site if bounce rates are high, or if visitors aren’t finding what they hoped for.