Analyzing Google Analytics
If you are not using Google Analytics to monitor the traffic on your website, you should be. It’s free and easy to use. It’s all transparent to those viewing your site, but provides you with a great deal of good information. After spending the money and resources to send potential customers to your website with various marcom tactics, measuring the effectiveness of those efforts is the next step in a strong campaign.
So, what information can you glean from Google Analytics?
Average Page Depth
There is a Content Optimization>Content Performance>Depth of Visit report that tells you the average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session. This report lets you see if your site architecture is working properly as well as if people are finding what they need and taking actions suggested by your content.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave from that page without going to any other page. Seeing bounce rates on home pages of around 50% are typical in our experience. This can be (most likely) that the visitor is not looking for what you have (perhaps a wrong click or misinterpretation of a search engine listing) or the visitor found what he or she was looking for, like a phone number or address (you always put your phone number and address on each page of your website, don’t you?).
Hits
Many people misinterpret a hit as being a visitor. It’s not. A hit is a request by the visitor’s browser for a file – a file of any kind. If you have an older site that was built in “slices,” opening a single page could deliver dozens of hits. These files can be an HTML page, an image, a video, a script or many other file types. This is important information for those analyzing traffic data, but other reports, including page views, new visitors and unique visitors, might be more useful for general business purposes.
Keywords
Keywords are some of the most important elements of Google Analytics. Keywords (and key phrases) are the words people are typing into the search box on Google.
Even if you are not successfully getting into your prospects’ heads (we can help you with that!) and guessing what keywords they’re using to search for you or your product, Google Analytics will show you what keywords people are using to find your site. With that knowledge in hand, you can better “search engine optimize” the site by strategically inserting those keywords into your website pages so customers will find you on their terms (we can help you with that, too!).
Meta Tags
These are part of the “head” of an html document…you don’t see them on the page. There are two types significant to search, though not as significant as they were, as Google claims that they don’t index sites based on this data anymore: Meta Keywords (see above) and Meta Descriptions. Meta keywords are single words and phrases on which people may search. A Meta Description is a description of a site or the business of the site’s owner. Other search engines still use Meta Tags to index sites, so we still place them in the “head” of the document.
New visitors
Google places a small string of code called a cookie on your computer when you first visit a tracked site. That way, Google can distinguish between new traffic and returning visitors. Running a banner ad on a different website with a distinctive market or getting a press release picked up by a popular news source will drive up the new visitors traffic, by exposing your site to different audiences who might have an interest in you product or service.
Page Views
This, rather than a Hit, is what we want to count. A page view is what it sounds like. Somebody viewed your page. This is typically the basic unit of measurement; did the new web ad or blog post result in increased traffic? After determining page views in a specific time period, other information, such as session data, page depth data and referrals, will come into context.
Referrals
A referral report tells you the site from where your incoming visitor came. That site is called a referrer. Most of the time it’s Google, but if you’re running a good banner ad campaign, have a link in a buyers’ guide or post links on social media sites, for instance, you’ll be able to see where the traffic comes from in this report.
Session
A session is the amount of time a single visitor spends on your site. A session ends when the visitor leaves or is inactive for 30 minutes (you can change this setting). As with average page depth, this is a good indicator of how people use your site (which will vary greatly from business to business) compared to page views, referrals and new/unique visitors that are good indicators of who is viewing your site.
Unique Visitors (or Absolute Unique Visitors)
Using cookies, Google is able to determine unique visitors as well as new visitors. With this data and the sessions data, you can get a feel for what’s really going on with your website. Are people coming back for multiple sessions? Or do you have a “once and done” website. Again, depending on your business, either could be desirable.
These metrics offer so much data if you know what to do with them. For marcom tactics that have few good measurement tools to determine ROI (like social media outlets), these metrics can provide tangible proof a campaign is working. They can help guide the crafting of your message and help you select the appropriate media and methods of marcom as well as validate the success of a program or even show one’s shortcomings.