Imagine walking into a clothing store and a sales associate starts hosing you down with endless questions.
“How do you like our new sweaters? Are you planning on staying another 5 minutes? Is there anything we could do to make your shopping experience better?”
All this before you’ve walked 5 feet past the front door.
In-person, this would be so obnoxious you’d turn around and leave as fast you walked in.
But Google Analytics can do the same thing in the background, quiet as a church mouse with tape over its mouth.
Google analytics insights are like that pesky sales associate except it’s a program that runs in the background of your site.
So what’s the big deal? Why bother tracking what visitors do on your site even if they don’t buy anything?
You don’t need a data science background to profit from Google Analytics
Google knows analyzing charts and graphs can be daunting even for professionals.
So they now offer a solution.
With the Intelligence App, located on your Google Analytics dashboard, you can get the exact insights Google tracks for you without dredging through piles of statistics.
For example, “what is my best performing product,” shows you the answer to your question without pouring over all your other unrelated stats.
“That’s great, but how do I get more sales?”
Do you put endless hours into tweaking your homepage? Obsess over where each menu item is located and whether your imagery is captivating enough?
We’ve all been there. Businesses often see their homepage as the grand entrance to their online property.
But in reality, your homepage is more like the side door customers use only if they happen to walk by it.
Most of your traffic, both paid and organic, comes from single product pages and keyword-heavy blog posts.
Why?
Think about the last ad you clicked. Maybe you were looking for a new toaster. When you search for terms, like “cheap toaster”, the ads you click on bring you right to the product page.
Or even a blog post on why it’s more cost-effective to buy an expensive toaster instead of a cheap one that breaks every couple years.
So how can Google Analytics make our site more user-friendly?
Remember our pesky sales associate? If they kept track of the order your customers browsed in, you could organize your store to match it.
For example, let’s say you own an e-commerce store selling air conditioning unit replacement parts.
If I visit your site from an ad on how to fix my air conditioning unit, I’ll need to check out replacement parts after.
To capitalize on this you could have links to the most common parts sold to readers after reading your blog post.
Google Analytics leave a crumb trail behind every customer so you don’t have to guess what they’re looking for.
Monetizing Popular Content
Is your page with the highest number of visitors also your biggest money loser?
It seems so counterintuitive. You spend thousands on ads, get the traffic you need, but end up sitting on a pile of inventory.
How can we remedy this?
You can always add new media and improve the design. But to really find out why your page isn’t converting, add a live chat option or survey.
Pages with a lot of visits but a high bounce rate often have a disconnect between what is on display and what you actually get.
For example, your most-visited blog post targets customers looking for a style guide for their next interview.
Instead, it recommends outfits much too casual for work. This has two negative consequences:
- Not only are customers leaving before they buy anything,
- They now have the impression your site is a false advertiser.
This is what salespeople call “burning the lead.” And once a web visitor has a bad impression of you, they could hold onto it for a long, long time.
Understanding Your Bounce Rate
The purpose of analytics and insights isn’t to pat yourself on the back for your best-performing ads and landing pages.
It’s to find the weak links so you can bring them up to speed with the rest of your website.
Remember, your bounce rate is anytime a customer visits a single page of your site without exploring further.
The opposite of a bounce is an entrance. This is when a customer continues to other parts of your site.
This is why it’s important to use all Google Data Insights you have access to. Time spent on a page can signal whether it’s your content or something else causing people to leave.
Google SEO Insights cut down on your research by handing it to you on a silver platter with a parade of drumming monkeys trailing behind.
In other words, what used to be a complicated system of scraping data from customer relationship management (CRM) systems is now automated.
If customers are spending time interacting with your content but not proceeding, you know it’s a problem with your call-to-action or site organization.
Not to mention a single user can open up multiple sessions in a day.
A customer may enter your site through several different pages, but if they enter from different links, ads, or times of day it won’t count as an entrance.
Customize, Customize, Customize
Let’s say you own an online shoe store. While it’s a safe bet everyone visiting your site is in the market for shoes, they aren’t all going to be looking for stilettos.
Those customers are going to have a completely different budget and style than customers buying running shoes. This is why we need to group our customers by their shopping interests.
To do this, go to your Analytics dashboard, follow the menu from “Audience”, the select “Insights”, and select “Overview”.
This brings up a list of all your customers’ interest. It’s like a buffet of marketable content you know will peak visitors’ interests.
You can set your most frequent visitors into a customized segment all their own. This lets you compare their activity on your site to less engaged visitors.
Still need help? Google Analytics Is even better with professionals on your side
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