Google Analytics is an incredible, free tool that allows website owners to investigate how well their website is performing. If you don’t use Google Analytics for your website you won’t know which pages are performing well, which are performing poorly, where your traffic is coming from and how many visitors are converting into customers or enquiries.
Here are some of our favourite features and reasons to use Google Analytics:
- Find out how people are engaging with your website. You will be provided with a bounce rate (the percentage of people leaving your website after viewing just one page), the lower the bounce rate, the better your website is performing. If you don’t know your bounce rate then you’re missing out. Find out what your bounce rate is, then think of ways to lower it and monitor your progress.
- Discover which are you best and worst performing pages. Google Analytics will show you every page of your website and how many visitors have viewed it, discovered your website by that page and how long they stayed on it. This gives you the opportunity to identify the strengths in your top performing pages and bring this good practice to your websites weaker pages.
- Understand what advertising methods are working for you. Whether your traffic is coming from social media, search engines, paid advertising or from a link on another website Google Analytics will show you where your visitors are finding you. This can be an incredible tool and show you that you may need to spend more time and effort on SEO, or that all your hard work on social media channels isn’t turning into website traffic. Whatever the situation with your website, Google Analytics will show you what’s going right and wrong, it’s then up to you to improve things.
- Visitor Locations. Google Analytics will show you where in the country and the world your visitors are coming from. This can be a powerful tool to gauge how effective an advertising campaign has been. If you have advertised in a local area, you can actually see if traffic to your website has gone up in that area whilst the advert was running.
- Conversion Tracking. Whether you want visitors to buy something or complete an enquiry form, setting a goal in Google Analytics and tracking your conversion rates can show you the percentage of visitors that turn into an enquiry or sale. This feature will also allow you to see what channels (social media, paid advertising, search engine traffic etc.) have the highest conversion rates.
- Behaviour Flow. Get an understanding of how visitors engage with your website. The behaviour flow option will show you what pages visitors are landing on and what they visit next. This gives you the opportunity to make alterations to your website if you feel that you would get more results if the traffic flowed in a different way.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool and these are just some of our favourite features. We strongly recommend installing Google Analytics on your website and monitoring traffic levels with the aim bring to increase your visitor levels. More traffic = more customers!