Have you ever visited a website and thought its functionality and design need to be updated? In the era of digital experiences, having a well-designed, functioning and updated website is important. It’s not only beneficial aesthetically, but it helps greatly improve website performance. You may be asking yourself – how well did my website perform this month compared to last month? Which sources are best for sales conversion? Which pages are performing poorly, and which one should I prioritize? Figuring out these needs can be difficult, especially if website traffic is not your area of expertise.
Websites serve as a critical marketing function, helping with sales and generating leads. However, websites are a work-in-progress, constantly needing to be updated with fresh content in order to perform well. To help you understand website performance and answer the above questions, it’s essential to use tools like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Explained
Google Analytics is a free web-based analytics tool that aims to help improve website performance and pages, extend the length of and increase visitors. To get started, set up Google Analytics on your website. It’s fairly simple – you create an account, connect Google Analytics to your website and add the designated tracking code snippet into the header section of your website. However, Google Analytics may require some patience as it may take a few hours to gather website data and see current results.
Quality, not Quantity
Website traffic is defined as web users who visit a website. Its effectiveness is measured by visits or sessions. Just because a website has large amounts of traffic, doesn’t mean visitors are taking the time to actually look through the content. You should understand your bounce rate and time on page to understand how long users stayed. The focus is to get people to spend time on your website, not inflated vanity metric reports. With website traffic, focusing on quality over quantity is key to your success.
Improving Website Traffic with Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides an enormous amount of data that helps you understand the more intricate details of website performance. By using Google Analytics, users can:
Monitor and extract useful data
Google Analytics allows users to obtain reports that are delivered directly to their email. It’s an easy tool that avoids having to sort through data and allows businesses to spend more time on working instead. However, you need to know and understand the data you’re looking to extract to ensure you’re getting the right reports delivered into your inbox.
Understand Visitor Behaviours
While the homepage is usually the first page users see when typing your URL into a search bar, Google Analytics finds which pages have the most traffic. There are other pages than your home page that have the most traffic, especially if you have a blog that you update frequently. Google Analytics can tell you where the traffic is coming from, whether it’s the home page or search engine queries, through behaviour flow reports. The navigation summary provides an overview of where your visitors originated and where they went next. When you know where your visitors are going and how they’re getting there, you can strategically place new information or even lead forms on these pages.
Identify keywords driving visits
Google Analytics reveals the top search queries that drive traffic to your website. It shows exact search terms that are generating visits. This gives organizations an opportunity to either capitalize on the search term or change the website content if the search term is not on brand.
Seek new markets
If you’re looking to expand your reach, Google Analytics can help. Let’s say your top expansion choices are Europe and South America, but after reviewing site traffic and conversion rates, Australia becomes a top contender. Analytics allows you to look at the geographical breakdown and analyse new markets.
By using Google Analytics to identify areas of improvement, you can increase website traffic and time spent on each page. Understanding data extracted, visitor behaviours, keywords driving visits and general website traffic based on geographic location can help with not only increasing visitors, but also help increase sales.
Jessie Koerner is a Senior Account Executive at Mulberry Marketing Communications, an award-winning full-service B2B communications agency based in Chicago, London and Australia. She has a deep passion for media relations, strategic PR and marketing campaign planning and content creation.
