This week we are going to cover tracking your website performance using Google Analytics.
What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog!
If you have a website, you should be using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that Google has provided that tells you all of the activity on your website.
Recently I was having a discussion with a client about their analytics. This client was a bit overwhelmed by the information he was finding in Google analytics and was trying too hard to make sense of some of the data there. This is very very easy to do.
So in this video I want to tell you the 3-4 things you should be checking on Google Analytics to see what people are doing on your site.
First, go to the Audience Overview data and make sure to change the date range to the last 30 days or, if you prefer, look at the last month. In this section, you will want to pay attention to the Users, New Users, and Pageviews data. These are probably the most important things you can track over time. You want to see if you can continue to increase your traffic and how many pages are being viewed. You also want to look at the graph for any spikes. If there are spikes, then try and figure out why. Perhaps there was a piece of content that went viral.
Second, go to Traffic, All Traffic, and Source / Medium. In this section, you want to see who is sending you the traffic. It is important to note that a lot of your traffic is not going to be trackable. If you send out an email to your audience and they are using Gmail, for instance, you will not necessarily be able to track that in Google. Fortunately, in this example, your email service provider will be able to track those clicks. But look for any outliers. Was there an article that linked to you that created some additional traffic? If so then reach out to the author and thank them. This section will also tell you which social media networks if any are sending you traffic. You’ll need to use the analytics in the actual social media network in order to figure out what posts created the traffic, but Google Analytics is a good way of seeing where you should spend your time online.
The last section I want to point out is Behavior, Site Content, All Pages. In this section, you will see what people are actually looking at on your website. It will tell you what content is being viewed. It is important to note that the forward slash is Google’s way of displaying the homepage of your site. You can also tell what the time on page is for a particular page or article. So if you wrote a blog post that is really long and detailed but the time on page is less than 20 seconds, then you know that you missed the mark in some way.
If you do not have analytics installed on your website then we are willing to do that for you for free. Just email me at marcus@bluefishds.com and we’ll get you squared away.
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!