Making the most of Google Analytics

For a free and relatively easy to use tool, it’s surprising how many businesses either don’t have Google Analytics or – even worse – fail to regularly look at the very important data they can reveal about your website visitors. Effective data mining will play a major role in your SEO strategy.

Here are three basic insights that Google Analytics can reveal about your business

1 – Visits

On a very basic level, knowing the number of visitors is an indicator of the success or otherwise of your internet or general marketing activity, and the number of new visitors will indicate the ‘overall’ success of any campaigns and activities.

2 – Pages per Visit

This is the first indicator of customer engagement because it simply shows how many pages were viewed by visitors. A low number of page views may point to some problems, but the page view figures can’t reveal a definitive problem – the figures will just tell you that some further action is required. Low page views will tend to indicate either that there is a disconnect between the search term and the website content or that the website content is not communicating clearly – its could be too difficult to find the right products/services, too difficult to navigate – or the website is just plain dull. It may be time to call in website design experts or an SEO agency.

3 – Bounce Rate

This represents the percentage of single-page visits to your site. It gives you a sense of how many visitors left your site from the entrance page rather than clicking further into your site as compared to total visitors. Like Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate can help you determine the performance of your entry pages based on the actions visitors take (or don’t take) after they’ve arrived on your site. A high bounce rate will indicate that people are not finding what they wanted on the page. There are lots of reasons unrelated to the website why this can occur, but a high bounce rate across the site is another indicator that either there is a mismatch between keywords and content, or simply that the content on the page is unappealing. Further investigation and working with an SEO agency is required. Understanding these three very basic metrics could have a major impact on your SEO – and therefore on the success of your website and internet marketing. However, for that to happen you need to make sure you examine Google Analytics regularly (weekly or at least monthly) and do something to make sure the figures improve. If you found this tutorial helpful then please click Like or Tweet or leave a comment. Remember to watch this space as we will be releasing a range of SEO blogs over the coming months. Our readers can also find our Opace Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/OpaceWebDesign. For all the latest goings on, you can keep up-to-date with Opace on Twitter https://twitter.com/OpaceWeb. And we also now  have an Opace YouTube page live at http://www.youtube.com/user/opacewebdesign.

Image credit – Blue Fountain Media