This week we are going to be talking through why you should be using Google Analytics for your website.
What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog!
Measuring the behaviors of those visiting your website is the foundation of any good Digital Marketing strategy. You have to know what is resonating with your audience. So I want to use this episode of the vlog to explain Google Analytics.
If you are not familiar with Google Analytics, it is the standard when it comes to tracking website traffic. I think every website should have Google Analytics installed and there are a few Key Performance In you should be keeping an eye on.
If you have Google Analytics installed then go login so you can follow along.
When you first log into the reports Google Analytics shows you a graph of the visits over the last 30 days. Typically, I start by looking for spikes in traffic. That would indicate that either something we wrote was extremely popular or that the site got posted somewhere that is sending us a lot of traffic. Either way, I want to know who, when, and how the spike was generated. If you hover over the points on the graph it will tell you the numerical value of the point.
The initial page also shows how many Users, New Users, Sessions, Pageviews and the Average Session Duration. All of these are important to know. Users & New Users are just barometers for how much traffic you are getting. Generally speaking the more the better. But I also want to caution you that a ton of traffic without conversion means you are missing something. I’ll gladly take a lower numerical value of visitors for a higher percentage of conversions. Pageviews and Pages Per Visit tell me that once the person is on the site they are poking around a bit. The Duration of their visit tells me whether it was just a cursory glance of the site or if they are reading through something on the site. For example, several years ago I wrote a blog post that was the longest I’ve ever written and the duration of that site averages around 9 minutes which is just crazy!
Next, we are going to look at the Acquisition / All Traffic / Referrals report. I like this report as it will tell you where your traffic is coming from. Remember those spikes I mentioned? Those should manifest themselves here as a site that has sent you a large amount of traffic. Clicking on the link should give you a breakdown of the URLs that are originating the traffic.
The last thing (and quite possibly the most important) that I look for is under Behavior / Site Content / All Pages. This report tells you what people are looking at on your site. It is important to note that / represents your homepage. So more than likely "/ " will always be at the top of the list.
I like to check these Key Performance Indicators weekly. Especially if we are blogging a lot. It tells me what topics are hitting the mark with folks that read our blog. If a certain topic is getting more interest than others then I will spend more time writing content on that topic.
Well, that’s a wrap for this week! I want to thank you for checking in. Make sure to hit that like button. And if you have any questions or comments leave them down below. If you want to talk about how Blue Fish can help you grow your business just send us a message and we’ll get the conversation started!