Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Limited use of the service is free however a premium account can be purchased for a very reasonable price. The product is aimed at marketers and it is the most widely used website statistics service. According to BuiltWith, in August 2013 Google Analytics was used by 66.2% of the 10 000 most popular websites.

One of the biggest advantages digital marketing has over traditional marketing is the ability to accurately measure your efforts and results. This is done in the form of analytics, with Google Analytics being the most popular tool. Knowing how to access and analyse your website metrics will allow you to make well-informed decisions when it comes to optimising your website content for effectiveness. This is the part of inbound marketing that you need to pay attention to - as you’re not appealing to customers with ads you need to make sure you’re appealing to them with your web content.

Did you know? Google Analytics can also be used to measure your Social Media platforms, blog, links from referring sites, links from search engines, as well as PPC networks, email marketing and all digital collateral such as links in eBooks etc.

It is important to know where your visitors come from as there are numerous ways for users to find your web content and it is important to be very aware of all of them.

Types of Traffic

Organic visitors: These are visitors that found your webpages through a search engine.

Direct visitors:  These are visitors that heave heard or seen your URLs and entered them directly into their browser.

Referral visitors: These visitors were directed to your web content through various links on other webpages and content, these could include social media links, or digital collateral links such as email signatures.

By studying the pages on which referral is made to your web content, you will be able to discover which parts of your content is popular, where it is popular, and amongst whom. With this information you can adapt your content strategy to start catering for this specific target audience.

Key Features

Goal setting: With this feature you can set and track goals, such as unique visits, visitor duration etc.

Google Adwords integration: You can review your Adwords campaign through tracking landing page efficacy and conversion rates.

Audience demographic data: Understanding the behaviour of your users is crucial in making well-informed marketing decisions, by providing detailed demographical data of your users you are able to segment your online target market and identify who to tailor your content for.

Detailed analytics reports: Having your analytics presented in a detailed and simplified report makes interpreting the data considerably easier and convenient.

An updated user API:  You are now able to create administrators, adjust admin permission as well as configure viewing settings through the API.

Key Terms

Unique Visitors: Unique visitors displays the new visitors to your web content. This figure should be constantly climbing. In the case where this figure is slumping or staying the same, action should be taken, perhaps in the form of an Adwords campaign.

Repeat Visitors: The name is pretty self-explanatory, this figure is important and maintaining a strong percentage in repeat visits is a strong indication of great content. According to Hubspot, having about 15% of your overall traffic as repeat visits is a healthy rate.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors that jump on and straight off of your page, indicating that your site reflects poorly on first impressions, or that link referrals are irrelevant to your content, navigating visitors to a site where they don’t want to go. Other possible explanations involve confusing architecture, or no clear calls-to-action where specific information can be requested. It is important to note that Google measures your bounce rate and adjusts your search engine ranking accordingly, so ensure this figure is carefully monitored.

Comparing your most popular pages with your least popular pages enables you to explore how and where they differ – which means you could better those unpopular pages and enable the popular ones to be used as traffic catchment areas.

Conversion Rate: This is the single most important metric to measure and is made up of the Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate, the Visitor-to-Customer Conversion Rate and the percentage of visitors who become customers. If these ratios display high and growing numbers it means that you are getting good business from your online presence. A website may have 1000 visitors per day, but if the conversion number is non-existent, you have an ineffective website.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool which allows you to constantly monitor your analytics, identifying weaknesses in your online presence. By identifying these weaknesses you can tweak your content and optimise your website to generate new business and grow your business empire (or soon to be).

Julian Karstel is a Digital Marketing Consultant for Sound Idea Digital | @JulianKarstel | Julian@soundidea.co.za

Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital agency | www.soundidea.co.za

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