You Need Google Analytics for your Website

Do you want to drive more traffic to your website?

Do you want to get more out of your existing traffic? (more lead forms, for instance).

If yes, then you need to get Google Analytics on your website.

You don’t have to use specifically Google’s free analytics platform as long as you have some type of web statistics tracking tool.

Why do I need it?

Analytics platforms provide TONS of data, more than you need. This often turns off and overwhelms many who are trying to utilize it.

You only really need a few pieces of data, or ‘metrics’ as they are called:

• How many visitors you are getting each day
• What channel they came in from:
  1. Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, etc
  2. Direct: Directly typing your domain in the browser window
  3. Search: Google Search
• If they came in from Search, what keyword phrase they searched
• The entrance page for each visitor (it is not always the home page)
• The exit page for each visitor
• Average time on your website

 

How to use the data

By using the metrics, we just listed you can get a considerable insight into your website’s performance.

Let’s look at a specific example of using ‘average time on site’ to make conclusions about your site’s content.

If you find that the average time spent on your site is very low (under a minute), you can suspect a few different things:

• The visitors arriving do not like your content at all, and leave right away. Visitors are being shown relevant content to their search however it is not what they wanted, or poor quality. You could come to this conclusion simply by looking over your content and seeing how good it is. If you have a ‘low time on site’ and mediocre content then you can be sure that your content needs work.
• The visitors arriving get exactly the content they needed, and leave right away. Visitors are being shown relevant content and it is consumed very fast, and there is no use to stick around. Think of a ‘lyrics’ website. People spend not more than a few seconds on the page, and then leave, because they got exactly what they wanted. If you have a ‘low time on site’ and good content, then you simply need to get creative on finding ways to keep your visitors on your site, and offer them more content. In this case there is nothing wrong with your content.
• You are showing the wrong content to the wrong people. If you have people coming in to your site who were searching about freemasons and you are showing them articles about masonry, then you need to completely rework, and get the right audience to your pages. This happens with website that are SEO’d too broadly and try to rank for terms not related to their content.

Further Analysis

Showing the wrong people, the wrong content can also play out like this:

Say you have a landscaping website, and you drive traffic to it. You prominently feature ads on the site promoting a catering service. You find in your Analytics that no one ever clicks on your ad for the catering service. The reason that no one clicks is because the audience who is arriving at your website is there for landscaping information, not catering information. Therefore, if your ads were more closely related and relevant to the audience’s search, the ad would get more clicks.

 

Conclusion

Just by looking over the single metric of ‘time spent on site’, you can gather a considerable amount of information about what is going on with your site. You can use this to make improvements and give your visitors a better experience.