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Why is Google Analytics Important?
Google Analytics is a free service that enables you to get valuable insight into the traffic your website is getting or not getting. It’s one of the most beneficial digital marketing tools. Yet, most businesses don’t use it. If you are looking to grow your business’s online presence, Google Analytics is a must, and this is why.
What is The Google Analytics Tool and How to Get it
Google Analytics is a tool offered by Google that monitors and evaluates the traffic on your website. It analyzes anything from who is clicking on your site to what pages they spend the most time on. It can even tell you how they found your website. All of this information is crucial if you want your website to be successful.
You can download Google Analytics here. Or, if you are one of Charley Grey’s clients, we can download, manage, and analyze the metrics for you. We’ll send you an intuitive summary of the data so you can skip the headache of decoding the metrics. Simply put, we’ll let you know how your website is doing.
Importance of Google Analytics For Business
You can get two types of data from Google Analytics—user acquisition and user data. Both give you important information that helps you understand the demographics of your site’s visitors. It also gives you specifics on when and how visitors are using your site. More specifically it helps you answer the following questions.
Where are your visitors coming from?
This helps you know if your website is being seen by your target audience. It also helps you know whether they are coming organically or as a result of paid ads.
How did they find your website?
Why spend money on digital advertising or campaigns if it isn’t bringing your website any traffic? Knowing this information helps you rope in your efforts so you can prioritize the referrals that work.
What web browsers do your visitors use?
Do your customers prefer Google or Bing, or something else? Different browsers require different focuses.
Which keywords are being used to find your website?
SEO, search engine optimization, can make all the difference in whether or not your website is being seen. You want to build off of the keywords that are being searched since they’re bringing users to your site.
How are users moving around your website?
This, in essence, tells you whether your website is user-friendly. Knowing this can tell you what pages visitors like, and what pages could be condensed to improve the user experience.
Understanding Your Google Metrics
Google analytics can be difficult to navigate through and understand if you don’t know all the lingo. Here are the terms that matter most:
- Sessions: A session is when a user interacts with a page on the website. This can be as simple as a user reading your content or downloading an image, a freebie, or a sample product.
- Users: This is the number of unique users that have landed on your website within the month.
- Page views: A pageview is recorded every time a page is viewed. When a visitor hits the back button, a page view is recorded. When a visitor hits refresh, a page view is recorded.
- Pages / Session: This shows how many pages the user is navigating during a given session. A higher number here can be a sign that your website could improve its efficiency.
- Avg. Session Duration: How long the average user is on your website.
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the page they entered on without browsing any further. Maybe they just didn’t find what they needed fast enough. It could also be that your site wasn’t at all what they were looking for, to begin with. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Over 70 is considered very poor and site alterations should be addressed.
- % of New Sessions: The % of new users visiting the website.
Using This Data to Achieve Your Business Goals
Utilizing Google Analytics can help you know what marketing efforts are working and what you can do better. It is a must if you want your website to draw in new users and convert them into loyal, paying customers.
Charley Grey uses Google Analytics to help track our client’s growth. Shoot us an email at [email protected] to hear how we can help you grow your website.