Do you want to improve your website, but are not sure where to start?
The answer is to begin with the data. If you want to make changes to your website, base those changes on user behavior instead of making random changes that you think you need.
There’s a good chance that if you have a website, you’re using Google Analytics. GA is abbreviated as Google Analytics which is used by nearly 40 million sites and is growing steadily for nearly a decade.
Although millions of people use website analytics, many site owners do not understand what their analytics can provide. If you’re finding it difficult to make sense of all the data, you’re not the only one.
Although it may be visually appealing to look at dozens of charts and graphs, it would be more beneficial to be able to see what is most important.
We’re going to look at 16 statistics and tips that you can use to improve your business. After you study these recommendations, you can improve your site’s performance and conversion rate by making changes in the areas that need improvement.
How do you stack up against your competition?
The benchmarks tab is important because it shows you how your website is doing in comparison to your competitors. The first metric you should check is the benchmarks tab in order to see how your website is doing in comparison to your competitors. This will allow you to see how well your site is performing in comparison to other sites within your industry.
Although this data may not be entirely accurate due to the fact that not all competitors may be using Google Analytics, it is still useful information. This will also provide you with a general overview of how your site is performing.
Do you know how engaged your visitors are compared to your biggest competitors?
You can improve your website by comparing average time on site against your competitors. This will give you a better idea of where you need to make changes to start improving your website.
Where do your visitors live?
It is possible that not all your visitors are from your local area.
To find this, go to Audience in the sidebar. Next, click on Geo, then Location.
The map overlay feature in the country view is not very useful and does not provide much information about your visitors. It’s usually too broad to be actionable.
If you want to get more useful information about your audience, you should look at data at the city level. Just click on City underneath the map.
For example, even if your business is based in the U.S., most of your traffic might not be coming from a U.S. city—most of it could be coming from London.
After you analyze the geographic data and figure out where most of your audience is located, you can change your business to better please these particular audiences.
Who’s buying, and who’s just window shopping?
If your product or service is a one-time purchase, your goal is to increase the number of new visitors to your website. If you want customers to come back, then you should try to increase the number of returning visitors.
If you’re selling a product, it is generally better to find ways to get existing customers to buy again than to find new customers for each purchase.
You can use your analytics data to track customer behavior, including sales, returns, and browse behavior. You can track different types of visitors by using cookies or referrer information.
How quickly are people leaving your site?
One way to increase your sales is to get more traffic to your website, but you can also increase your sales by controlling how many people leave your website.
A high bounce rate is generally a cause for concern The percentage of people who leave your site after one page is your bounce rate. A high bounce rate is generally a cause for concern. Time on site measures how long a person spends on your website in a given session, while time on page measures the average amount of time spent on a specific page. You can use this information to see which pages people are spending the most time on and make changes accordingly.
If people appear to be leaving your website or product, you may want to consider modifying the design or offering to make it more appealing. One way to increase your revenue is to increase your prices.
Are you compatible with the right browsers?
You may be an experienced computer user, but your customers may be less so.
If you want to make sure that your website is displaying correctly for your customers, you need to find out which web browsers they are using.
Chrome has nearly 60% of the worldwide market share for web browsers. But that might not hold true for you.
If your website isn’t compatible with Firefox, you could be losing a lot of business because 30% of your visitors use Firefox. This also applies to mobile browsers and different operating systems.
Are you compatible with the right screens?
If you go back in time to 1990, the monitors people had were bulky and had low resolutions. Most people today use high-resolution flat screen monitors, laptops, or mobile devices when browsing the web.
With more than half of internet users accessing the web from mobile devices, it’s no surprise that mobile usage has surpassed desktop usage for the first time. This milestone is even more impressive when you consider that tablets – once the next big thing in digital – are now being used less than either phones or computers.
The screen resolution section in Google Analytics lets you see what resolution your customers are using.
There are two things to look out for here. Before you add any new content to your site, check to see how much space you have left. This will help you avoid running out of space and having to delete old content. You don’t always need more area to provide a better experience, but if most of your users have large screens, you can take advantage of the extra space.
But the opposite may also be true. If you have a lot of users on mobile devices or using monitors with low resolution, you need to design your website to be optimised for their smaller screen size. A responsive design is a good way to design your website because it adapts to the dimensions of the user’s screen.
Who’s sending you traffic?
Referring websites are websites that send traffic to your website. This is a good way to see how people are finding your website.
While some sites see a lot of traffic from search engines, others get referrals from other types of sites. If you suddenly get a burst of traffic from an unfamiliar website, investigate it.
Try to generate more traffic from that website or find other websites like it with potential traffic.
Set your goals
Your Google Analytics needs goals. Simple as that. Although you can find data, it may not be significant. You need to know what people want to achieve when they visit your website, and then identify what factors influence that.
Do you want to get leads? Do you want to get sales? What is the goal you hope to achieve once people are on your website? Almost all of Google Analytics usefulness comes from this, which results in a better outcome.
Creating goals and segmenting them into a funnel is one way to make your goals more attainable. By breaking down your goals into smaller, more manageable pieces, you can better focus your efforts and see results more quickly. In the eCommerce world, this translates into:
At some places, you can buy things by selecting the product you want, adding it toyour cart, and then checking out and paying for the item.
This allows you to examine each stage of the process and identify areas that need improvement. GA can be seen as a roadmap in the sense that it can help guide you to your final destination. To learn how to set up goals, Google’s resource on the subject is recommended.
You have three options at the goal level:
- Goal Template
- Custom Goals
- Smart Goals
Funnels set up
The best way to get what your business wants from people is to set up a funnel in Google Analytics. This allows you to see where people are abandoning your website in their journey to the final goal you have set for your business site.
Most funnel, especially in eCommerce, follow the same sequence. Here are the steps:
Add To Cart >> Initiate Checkout >> Purchased
The more essential steps you can create in the process, the better, because it gives you more points of reference to work on. The actions taken by the person visiting the website must be necessary in order for them to either buy something or for the business to achieve its own objectives.
Enhanced eCommerce – horizontal funnel
To improve your Google Analytics skills for eCommerce, use the Enhanced Ecommerce feature by checking the “Shopping Behaviour Report.”
Why should you use it? There are many limitations to the classic funnel. The classic funnel is not bad, and it’s actually pretty good. However, you can’t segment your audience based on the user’s quality, such as their device.
The horizontal funnel allows you to segment audiences and create powerful advertising campaigns inside Google Adwords or Double Click. Audiences who added products to the cart using iPhone.
This is an example of what a horizontal funnel looks like in real life.
Why use the classic funnel when the horizontal funnel has the same function and enables you to segment users when looking at the data?
Become a Google Analytics developer
There’s something called RegEx, it means regular expressions. It’s a sequence of symbol and characters that enables you to create the following:
- Filters
- One goal matching multiple-goal pages
- You can put pages that have the same goal together
- Fine-tune your goals
Learning RegEx can definitely improve your Google Analytics skills. After a few times, it becomes easy to understand and remember the logic.
Custom reports matter in Google Analytics
You can create your own reports and dashboards on Google’s interface using custom reports. Google’s definition is pretty straightforward:
“A Custom Report is a report that you create. After choosing your dimensions and metrics, you decide how you want them to be displayed. You will need to specify at least one dimension and one metric.
There are three types of custom reports :
- Map overlay: a global map with colours to indicate metrics.
- Flat table: sortable data table.
- Explore simple reports with line graphs & data tables.
To find custom reports, go to the “Customization” section and look under “Custom Reports”.
Make sure you don’t have bugs
Remember that a website with lots of bugs or a slow loading speed will not be helped by a pretty design or branding.
Google Analytics can give you detailed information about website performance issues and bugs. This can be incredibly helpful in troubleshooting and identifying areas for improvement. For example, you can use Device Type to see if you have any bugs on specific types of devices. You simply have to go inside GA and click on those buttons:
Audience >> Technology >> Browser & OS Report
It’s important to look at one browser at a time when analyzing data because averages can be misleading. You may need to fix your Chrome browser while the other browsers are working correctly.
To see if your website is faster than a mafia yacht fleeing marine police:
Behaviour >> Speed >> Page Timings
You can Use Google Page Speed Insights to find ways to fix issues (if you have any).
Trusting the data
Importance is often placed on data that can be trusted. You can’t draw conclusions from something that isn’t trustable in the first place.
This means that you should only focus on the data that will have a big impact on your business, and not waste time on data that is not important.
Remember that data only tells you which way you went after you tried something new in order to make corrections. If you’re not regularly leveraging Google Analytics, you’re not getting the most out of your data.
Campaign tracking audit
Google Analytics is useful for tracking campaign results to see how effective campaigns are in different channels.
UTM tags are use to track your campaigns and give data to Google Analytics. They are made of five elements:
- Medium
- Source: channel from where the traffic is coming from.
- Campaign: segmenting your campaigns.
- Content: segmenting your ad creatives.
- Term: often used as a PPC keyword.
If you’re unsure about what to put in each part of the UTM code, consult the Cardinal Path Google Spreadsheet for guidance.
The two most important rules for campaign tagging are staying organized and keeping it simple.
Using filters
Filters can help you understand your data better by segmenting it. There’s not much to say.
Here are quick ideas of filters to use:
- Including/Excluding internal IPs
- Lowercase campaign tags
- Lowercase page URL’s
- Lowercase site search terms
Conclusion
Searching the data can be entertaining, but you must be cautious to locate the most crucial metrics to concentrate on. You should try to find out what your visitors are interested in, where they are coming from, and how they are accessing your website.
You can keep improving your bounce rate and meeting visitor demands as long as your site is online. Creating new products is also a way to keep your site fresh and relevant.
