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Google Analytics:
Improve your website with website analytics

What is website analytics?

Website analytics is a set of tools that allows you to track your website’s visitors. It is a piece of code that Google provides you to incorporate into your website, which collects facts about visitor behaviour. It records who requested a given page and other useful information. Below is what you can find with website analytics and how you can apply this knowledge to promote your business more efficiently.

Google Analytics will provide you answers to these questions:

• How many visitors come to your site?
• Where do the visitors come from (geographic location)?
• Are these visitors new or returning?
• What percentage of these visitors come through search engines?
• How do the visitors navigate through your site?
• What keywords do the visitors use to land on your website?
• What platform do the visitors use to view your site?
• What content of your website is the most and the least in demand?

Does it cost anything?

No. It’s free.

How to set it up

Go to the Google Analytics website and create an account by clicking on "Sign up," then fill out the form. Log in and follow the instructions on how to insert a few lines of JavaScript code into your web pages. If any of this is too complicated, let us know. We will gladly assist you.

12 indispensable statistics that Google Analytics will track for you

1) Visitor count

Learn how many people come to your site. Break down the information by year, month, week, day, hour, or any other custom metric for more detailed analysis.

2) Demographics

Learn where your visitors come from. Break down the information by country, state or province, city and region.

3) Language

If you have a multilingual site, find out the proportion of visitors that use each language.

4) Behaviour

Find out if your visitors are new or returning.

5) Mobile

Learn the percentage of visitors who view your website on a mobile device. Is your site adapted for it? Should it be?

6) Visitor flow

Visually analyze how your visitors flow through your website. Observe which areas are the most visited, and which are overlooked.

7) Advertising

Analyze the effects of advertising on your visitors. Use your Google Analytics code in all your online advertising efforts, even in electronic newsletters.

8) Traffic sources

Observe how visitors arrive at your website. Do they come from a search, a referral or directly? For those arriving as a result of a search, observe the keywords that lead the visitors to your website. For those coming based on a referral, take note of the sites that refer visitors to you.

9) Social media

Observe the traffic that social media generates on your website.

10) Content

Analyze what is your most and least popular page. Adapt your future improvements accordingly.

11) In page analytics

Observe your website with an overlay of statistics. View your website as if footprints were left there.

12) Platform, browser

Keep yourself informed on the hardware and software your visitors use. Are they on a PC, or on a Mac? What browser do they use? Adapt the coding of your website accordingly.

What are the benefits of using website analytics?

The biggest benefit of using website analytics is that it is like a focus group, except better. Much better. It tracks all visitors, not just a tiny proportion of them. The results are real-time, constantly coming in and will continue to come in forever. It’s like a never-ending focus group. And it’s free! It can’t get any better than that.

Examples of using website analytics

Here are some examples of website analytics in use.

Example 1: The volume benefit

If you know how many people come to your website, you can better plan your web budget. If the volume is too small, perhaps you should invest in an advertising campaign to promote your business. If the number is good, but no sales conversion occurs, you should work on improving your prospect-to-sales conversion. If the volume is growing exponentially every month, perhaps you should upgrade your web service or pay for a dedicated server.

Example 2: New content creation and budget allocation

Let’s say that you have a budget of $5,000 to create new content for your website. If you have no analytics in place, you will have rely on your gut feeling as to how that budget will be used and what content should be created. But if you have website analytics in place, the statistics will tell you what content is the most in demand and you will know how to spend your budget accordingly.

Example 3: Track your direct mail with website analytics

Let’s say that you are a translator, based in Montreal, offering English to French translations, and that you are looking to grow your clientele. Let’s say that you will target 250 prospective clients in both Toronto and Vancouver with a personalized direct-mail letter. You send all of these prospects a personalized letter asking them to call you for more information. You also direct them to your website. Following your mailing, you track the results and analyze the data.

Out of all your Vancouver mailings, five people have called you to learn more about your services. No calls came from Toronto. You conclude that your campaign has bombed in Toronto. But when you look at the proportion of your web traffic, you notice that the visitors coming from Toronto were three times as many as from Vancouver. You also discover that a greater proportion of them came to your site on a weekend.

What can you learn from this? 1) People in Vancouver prefer direct contact and direct mail more than the people in Toronto. 2) People in Toronto are probably busier, so much so that they deal with offers away from the office, in their spare time.

How will this information impact your future approach to increase your success rate? 1) Continue with direct mail and telephone in Vancouver. 2) Try a different approach with Toronto. Perhaps an email campaign sent on Friday or on the weekend.

Example 4: When in doubt, let your users decide

You devise a new look for your website, but cannot quite decide between the three proposed options. Your web designer swears by option A, your staff by option B, and you are in love with option C. Which option will you choose? Which option will be the best? The answer is easy. Try all three. With a little help from your web designer, run all three versions live and track their success rates. You may discover that one of the options clearly outperforms the others, in which case the winner is easy to declare.

Example 5: Adapt

Through analytics, you discover that some visitors find you through different keywords than the ones you use in your web pages. If you’d like to improve your standing in search results, regularly adapt your web pages by improving the use of keywords in page titles, headlines, text, links, ALT tags, etc.

Conclusion

Knowing your visitors will make your decision-making about your website updates more objective. Knowing your visitor behaviour will inspire you with new ideas and make your website more user-friendly. Observe, analyze and adapt for the benefit of your target audience. After all, your website exists for your visitors.

Posted on May 8, 2012