You know that having a great website and digital marketing plan that attracts potential customers are key, but do you know how to measure how everything is performing? Using Google Analytics to track the successes and failures of your website and marketing efforts will provide valuable information that can impact your business, but the amount of data available can be overwhelming and knowing what’s important is tricky. We’ll share what a SEO provider report would focus on, and it’s a much more manageable handful of statistics.
Where is Your Traffic Coming From?
Firstly, you want to figure out where your website traffic is coming from. To find this information, you’ll look at the “Acquisition” tab in Google Analytics. The main sources of traffic an SEO provider will focus on is organic search traffic, though she will also be interested in the relative amount of direct referral traffic. You might also see traffic from paid, display, email, or social sources as well.
Organic search means someone has searched a specific keyword through a search engine and arrived at your site by clicking on
one of the organic, or unpaid, results. Direct traffic refers to traffic that came to your website directly by typing your URL into a browser, or sometimes through another undefined channel. Referral traffic is traffic that comes to your site through a third party site which social traffic comes from third party sites that are major social networks. Paid and display traffic comes from paid search or display networks.
Tracking where your traffic is coming from allows you to adjust your strategy to maximize whatever generates the most traffic for your business.
How is Your Traffic Interacting With Your Site?
The next thing you want to look at is how that traffic is interacting with your site. This is where bounce rate comes into play. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that have left it after viewing just one page. This metric allows you to adjust things that might not be working: maybe you’re using the wrong keywords, or your landing pages aren’t working – there’s a reason that people are visiting and immediately leaving your site.
The reasons that people leave your site can also directly tie into why they’re visiting your site in the first place. Traffic source correlates with bounce rate and improving it means you’ll need to analyze where visitors are coming from, too. Talk with your SEO provider to gain insight on what steps to take to improve this figure.
Who is Your Traffic?
Looking at who is visiting your website will let you know who is most interested in your product and how to market toward that segment of the population. Google Analytics provides a lot of data about your website and its visitors and that includes demographic information. In particular, Google provides you insights into the age, location, and gender of your site visitors. The data provides you insights to help you refine your products and services and personalize your user experience to better appeal to who is actually visiting your site.
What Traffic is Converting?
Lastly, and probably most importantly, you want to see what traffic is resulting in conversions. Conversions measure specific ways users interact with your website that you determine to be important and set up to track. For example, you can track if people joined your mailing list, completed purchases, called you, and more. By reviewing conversion rate data, you can figure out what advertising is working and what’s not.
There’s a wealth of data available if you know where to look and how to interpret it, but these four things are where you should start. If you have questions about your website data or are in search of an SEO provider to help you with interpreting your Google Analytics data, we’re here to help!
