When running a business with an online presence, one must track their website visitors as much as possible. With tracking software such as Google analytics, one can recognize trends and glimpse into the mind of their visitors. Unfortunately, many fail to use Google analytics to its fullest and their business suffers. While this is a serious problem, it is not difficult to overcome provided an entrepreneur follows these five best practices regarding his or her analytics.
Begin Slowly
After installing the software, one can check their stats immediately and even see data in real-time. While it is, no doubt, enjoyable for a website owner to see this information all the time, it is a big time waster. To save resources and get a true measure of the data, a site owner should wait, at minimum, one week to check their account. When beginning the process slowly, one can make the correct assumption as there will be enough data to pore over and analyze. The same should hold true when a website owner makes significant changes to the current Web pages. Remember, when analyzing information, it is a mistake to draw conclusions from a small sample size.
Pay attention to the bounce rate
The bounce rate is an important metric one must closely watch and make adjustments as necessary. Now, some marketing people do not understand the term. Simply put, when a visitor lands on a webpage and leaves a site without visiting another page, the analytics software will count them as a bounce. While there is no ideal rate, if a website has a bounce rate of over 50%, the webmaster should consider making changes. Furthermore, the marketing department might need to change online advertising methods if users, in great numbers, visit the site without visiting multiple pages. Without a doubt, a website owner must watch this often overlooked metric.
Conversion rates
When looking to measure a return on investment, one must know their conversion rate. To set this up in Google Analytics, one must first define their goal rates. Then, a user can see their rate of conversion on downloads or sales. This metric is valuable for a company that sells products online as paying customers will support the business. When an e-commerce site does not meet their conversion rate goals, one must make serious changes to resolve the problem. Again, the marketing department may need to change their advertising campaign to find visitors who have a serious interest in spending money. Either way, when understanding conversion rates, one can begin to understand the entire process better and can help the company bring in clients who want to spend money.
Tablets, smartphones and computers
In the past, a company could create and design a simple website that visitors would have no problem accessing. Now, people use the Internet on their smartphones, tablets and personal computers. Furthermore, people use different browsers to reach their favorite websites. This presents a slight problem as pages may render differently depending on the system of the user. To fix this issue, one should log into their Google analytics account and check out the mobile visitors data. To take it further, a website owner should compare conversion and bounce rates for smartphone users and tablet users. If it is drastically different, the Web programmer can make small changes to improve the user experience. This will only get more valuable as consumers will continually access the Internet using their smartphones.
Excel & Analytics
When viewing data, many grow frustrated with Google Analytics as it is not user-friendly for a beginner. Not only that, there are severe limitations when a user accesses the data online. For this reason, one should export all their data to a CSV file as a computer user can open this with Excel or Open Office Spreadsheet. There is another benefit to this step; when exporting the information to a spreadsheet, workers can share it with people throughout the company without sending Google account login information. Any serious and hardworking webmaster should understand how vital it is to use Excel to analyze data as there are literally dozens of possibilities with this software.
When understanding Google Analytics, a company will have an easy time improving their website and the user experience. While it is not easy to use at first, most will understand the basics within an hour or two. Fortunately, with these five simple tips, a website owner can get a lot out of the program and take the right steps to improve the website.
Jeff Oxley is a digital marketing expert in Windsor, ON with HCA Mindbox, Windsor’s premier full service marketing company.
