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During your last web design process, you very likely had Google Analytics set up for your website. Google Analytics is by far the most widely used platform for getting statistics and data about your website. When set up correctly, it can be one of the most powerful tools to understand your customers and continually optimize your marketing efforts for generating leads and sales.
Analytics lets you know a wealth of information about how users are interacting with your website, and can help your business find new opportunities to grow online and offline. You wouldn’t stick with a direct sales strategy if you couldn’t measure the results, and for the same reasons, you shouldn’t allow your website analytics data to go neglected.
Below are three practical examples of questions that website analytics can answer, right from the default Audience Overview report.
Google Analytics Audience Overview
The Audience Overview report is the report that Analytics shows you by default when you first log in. So it also makes sense that it is one of the most valuable for evaluating your marketing plan. Here you can segment your visitors based on data that Analytics is able to determine about each user, and find out how different types of users interact with your website.
Which cities are visitors to your website coming from?
And which cities aren’t bringing you traffic (and present an opportunity to grow)? By understanding where incoming traffic comes from geographically, you can better link your online and offline marketing tactics that are targeting your website traffic. Running marketing campaigns in Vancouver and what to make sure that website traffic is increasing accordingly? Or, considering expanding to new locations across Canada and want to see where existing users are today? Use the demographics section to see a breakdown of traffic by country and city.
Which users are the most valuable for your marketing efforts?
Are users that come in through online marketing channels more or less engaged than those who find your website organically? How likely have each been to actually reach your contact page, fill out a request form, or complete a purchase? By segmenting sessions that users have had on your website in these categories, you can quickly find trends in which types of users are the most valuable. This is useful for both determining where your marketing budget should go, and also helping troubleshoot why certain types of users or campaigns aren’t providing as much value to your business as others.
Which browsers and devices are most used to access your website?
You likely have different goals with your web design on smartphones and tablets than on desktops, and it’s important to know how users on these devices interact with your business. Already considering improving your web design for mobile devices? The mobile section of the Audience Overview report may quickly justify the need, by showing you exactly what percent of users are accessing your site through a specific mobile operating system (and at what screen resolution). Within this same report, you can also segment your traffic to show how engaged users with your website are by the devices they used to access it.
There’s a lot of data to consider in Analytics, and different information is important to different members of an organization. One of the most useful features of website Analytics is the ability to build dashboards that summarize results for different marketing campaigns you might running. As part of our reporting process, we answer questions such as the ones outlined here through customized dashboards that we provide clients, and use this data to make ongoing recommendations for improvement.
Looking to have real-time data about your website? Get in touch – we love talking about marketing >>!
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