Your analytics data can provide you with a wonderful insight into the performance of your digital marketing activities. This will allow you to make better business decision in regards to your overall business performance.
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Do you know what a visitor to your website is doing?
Do you know why they leave your website or even where they left your website?
Why not?
Sometimes it may just be information overload. Because we have access to so much data we just tend to suffer from data blindness. So many numbers but you can’t tell what is happening.
From any business perspective it is important to understand your data and to highlight the patterns and trends so that you can make informed decisions.
The good thing is you can do a lot of testing and see the results almost instantly. This is wonderful. You don’t have to wait a month to see the figures. You can see them within 24 hours to determine your results
So you don’t have too much information overload. It is important to apply the 80/20 rule to your data and work on the action items that are going to give you the biggest result or that will take you to your overall company goals.
Here are 5 key areas you should be focussing on:
- Traffic Source/Return On Expenditure
- Leakages
- Trends and Patterns/ Predicting Future Sales
- Conversion Rates/ High Performers
- Low Performing Pages
When you know who your consumers really are, you can tweak your messaging to appeal more to them, consider launching products that cater to this new audience, and learn more about them
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1. Traffic Source
How do you know what marketing activity is driving visitors to your website?
What traffic source is best for the different levels of buyer? What level of buyer awareness are they at?
Your Google Analytics reports can help you with this.
By combining the power of your Source Medium report and UTM’s you can get a great insight into the performance of your different marketing activities.
Depending on the amount of data you have you can gain a very good insight to what traffic sources are working for you for each different type of buyer.
With this data you can see what traffic sources and bringing you what type of customer and how they interact with your website. By knowing this you can allocate your marketing budget to those areas that are giving you the better return.
You are able to allocate your resources to the areas that bring you the most. Over time with more and more data you will be able to predict what the outcome should be with a certain marketing activity.
Find Out Who Your Customers Really Are
You might think you have your customer base down pat, but Google Analytics data might have a different story to tell.
With Google Analytics all-knowing, all-seeing power, business owners can get information about the age, gender, and location of the people visiting their website.
When you know who your consumers really are, you can tweak your messaging to appeal more to them, consider launching products that cater to this new audience, and learn more about who buys your products/services so you can cater to them in your marketing materials.
To see your visitors' demographic data, expand the audience menu on the sidebar, then click on demographics and overview. In this view, you'll be able to see the percentage of people that visit your site that belong to each age group and gender.
You can see how many visitors you get from each country and further narrow it down to city level.
Low-Hanging Fruit' Pages to Improve for Search
To get some quick SEO insights is to view the terms currently sending you traffic in the queries report (helpfully located under Acquisition > Search Console) sections.
The objective here though is to find all pages or terms currently ranking on the second page of Google (you know, the one nobody clicks on), improve those, and get them ranking on the first page (so they're going to actually send you traffic).
Step 1.
Once you've located the Queries report, fire up an Advanced Filter. By default, Google often does a data dump into analytics, showing you tons of data at first glance and allowing you to dive deeper (if you know what you're looking for).
These advanced filters (in addition to secondary dimensions) will help you narrow down the results into something a little more actionable.
Step 2.
Now sort the data to display all results with an average position of OVER 10.
(There are 10 results on a search engine result page (SERP), which means the 11th position is the first result on the second page.)
Step 3.
Pull down all the results currently ranking high on the second page. This is your ‘low-hanging fruit' for quick content + SEO wins.
Now your job is to simply improve these pages! Maybe that's the design aesthetic or adding some new production design to liven the page up. It could be adding content and additional context or information to make the page more in-depth. It could even be adding in new media types like videos to help explain or show what the page is talking about.
Find high potential yet underperforming pages, and improve those FIRST before going back to creating new content from scratch.
2. Leakages
As we all know visitors don't always do what we expect them to. And they don't always find what they're looking for.
That's evidenced by high bounce rates, especially on important pages that are bringing in a ton of traffic to your site.
Finding those pages that (a) rank highly, (b) bring tons of traffic, but (c) fail to convert them could give you another quick boost of new leads or customers.
Step 1.
Start by locating your most popular content under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
Step 2.
Now we're going to use another filtering or sorting tool to make this information more relevant.
Click on Secondary Dimension, which we'll use to again filter Source / Medium.
Step 3.
Typically Google Analytics will automatically show the most popular pages. If that doesn't happen, simply click on the Unique Pageviews to show the most popular first.
Now cross-reference these super-popular search page,, picking out the ones with super-high Bounce rates.
It's common for blog posts to have bounce rates as high as 60-70%, however anything over that should be cause for concern .
General website pages have lower bounce rate ranges of anywhere from 30-40%.
Our goal here is to improve these pages! So many of the same tactics (e.g. adding new media types, improving design or internal linking, etc.) apply.
However you might also consider finding out WHY people are bouncing. Many times there's a disconnect or mismatch with what people were expecting to see, and the information on the page that you're delivering.
Try using some qualitative methods (like Qualaroo , live chat, or other survey pop-ups in your marketing stack ) to get quick feedback on what people want to find when they hit this page.
3. Trends
Google Analytics can help you identify important trends in your business that can help you plan for the future and make better marketing decisions.
For example, you can compare the number of site visits you get year over year.
Maybe your Facebook traffic grew by an explosive amount, but search traffic experienced a sharp decline.
After seeing this, you might decide to allocate more resources to optimizing your website for search engines and building backlinks.
Or after looking at your data across the past year or two, you see that you get the most site visits in the winter months.
How can you capitalize on this knowledge to increase sales during these busy times?
To compare date ranges, expand the field where the date is in the upper right-hand corner. Select the dates you want to compare.
Next, navigate to any submenu in the sidebar to compare data.
You may want to check the trends of organic search traffic, direct and social traffic.
Look at the trends for each segment.
As a business owner, you may decide to dedicate more resources to building up my search presence while continuing with your social media efforts.
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4. Conversion Rate High Performers
Unfortunately, visitors to your site don't always behave the way you want them to.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if prospective customers saw your ads, visited your site and ultimately made a purchase – all in a single sitting?
It rarely works like that, which is why understanding your conversion paths is so important – especially in today's advertising landscape, where people rarely complete a purchase on one device, never mind in one session.
In addition to illustrating how your visitors are actually converting (as opposed to how you think they're converting), examining your top conversion paths in Google Analytics provides a fascinating glimpse into user behavior – and the often-complex route many visitors take from first action to the ultimate conversion.
How to Examine Conversion Paths in Google Analytics
To look at these visitor journeys, go to the Top Conversion Paths section of the Conversions reports (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths).
Here, you'll see the top 10 conversion paths by default, with options to extend the number of rows being displayed.
For example you could see that the most effective conversion paths are pretty standard (two direct visits, an organic search leading to a display ad, three direct visits etc.), but some other conversion paths are a little more unorthodox. Two display ads? A direct search leading to a display ad? Two organic searches?
You also have the option to display the top conversion paths by MCF Channel Grouping Path and map these results against Keyword (Or Source/Medium) Path, which can reveal additional insights into how each of your channels is working:
Locate Top Performing Pages by Conversions
Understanding individual page performance and conversions that took place on each page can help provide enormous amounts of insight.
Navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and adjust the time periods to compare quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year.
You can look out for any negative trends on each individual page. If a specific page has seen a noticeable decline, the issue is most likely isolated to that one page.
Identifying How to Improve Paths through Your Site
Most clients (and bosses) obsess over the homepage. They nitpick image selection, and shove as many things as possible into the tiny layout you provide.
Which makes sense, because it's the focal point for how the rest of the site is going to look and function. It's typically thought that it's the starting point for the brand, where users begin their journey and find out where to go next.
However that's not always the case.
If you've been creating content successfully on a regular basis, you'll probably notice something strange when you view the most popular pages on your website… The homepage will only account for roughly ~30% of incoming traffic.
The rest?
Your long-tail blog topics that are picking up more informational or educational topic queries.
What does that mean? The way visitors navigate through your site is probably pretty different than what you expect (or planned ahead for).
Here's how.
Step 1.
Open up the Behavior Flow underneath the Behavior section.
Step 2.
Now filter or segment your traffic based on the Source/Medium it's coming through. Google/Organic will be your best bet for finding organic search visitors arriving at your site through content, SEO and other ‘inbound' means.
Step 3.
The first section here is your Starting pages, or landing pages / blog posts that people are coming to first from Google.
For example you may see that the homepage only accounts for 20-30% of total visitors. The rest are going to other pages and blog posts first.
Step 4.
The next interaction is where people are going after leaving the first page of your site.
Again, you'll notice that people commonly go visit other web pages or blog posts (in addition to the homepage).
That means you have these intuitive paths' that already exist on your website, where visitors are trying to navigate or find certain things that you didn't necessarily plan out.
A quick win here includes helping people navigate (or see appropriate calls to action) more easily.
Focus on the most common interactions or traffic flows, add new internal site links or ads to get people further down the funnel and into your macro (or micro) conversions.
5. Low Quality Pages
Identify Low Quality Traffic & Pages
Is it time for your website content to be revamped?
Maybe the CTAs on your site are weak and people are leaving instead of sending you their contact information?
One way you can identify problems like these is by seeing what pages on your site have a high bounce rate and/or a low page session duration.
A high bounce rate says that people aren't interested in sticking around. This is generally caused by two major factors: the source of your traffic is of low quality, or the pages on your website are low quality.
Similarly, a low session duration can indicate that the page doesn't keep their attention or it's not the result they were looking for.
To view bounce rate and session duration by channel, click all traffic and then channels under the acquisition tab.
Explore each source of traffic by clicking on each and reviewing the data on the following page.
To see how your pages are performing, you'll navigate to the behavior menu, then click site content and all pages. From there, you can sort by average time on page or bounce rate.
By getting into the practice of analysing your numbers regularly you will begin to see the patterns and trends relating to your site.
You will see what works for your visitors and what doesn’t.
By doing this you will begin to make better business decisions and see the results of your actions quickly.
Then you will make better decisions, see the results quicker and see your business results increase.
A little understanding and practice will take you a long way.
