How to find out what’s working on your site and what’s not

Let’s talk a little bit about Google Analytics. Are you familiar what “Google Analytics” is? It’s a free service powered by Google whereby you can track people’s behavior on your website. It came up a lot in 2018 because of GDPR coming into force. Google Analytics, is basically a way of understanding what’s going on your website, how people are behaving, how are people getting there and actually loads more!

The data your Google Analytics account collects can provide you with a massive amount of information. Each piece of data or ‘metric’, can have significance based on what you want to achieve with your website. There are three important metrics that I look at with my clients as a starting point and I’d like to share that with you today so that you can get started reading the data in your Analytics account without getting overwhelmed.

The essential metrics to check are:

• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior

Audience

The first thing that I look at is Audience. If your Google Analytics account has been up and running for a while, take a look at this section to understand the essential demographic information. 

Audience data includes information about:

• How many site visitors are coming for the first time or if they’re returning
• Their location
  • Country
  • City
• Their gender
• Their age range

The data in the Audience section can be very useful things for your business, the strategies that you choose to implement and the tone you use to create content.

Acquisition

This is a real useful one if you are doing a lot of promotional activities across social media. Within the acquisition tab, by choosing “overview” you can see how people are finding your website:

• Organic search
• Referrals
• Social media
• Email
• Paid
• Other

This is something that I get people to look at if they’re feeling very overwhelmed with social media and if they’re promoting on various different platforms, it can quite often be a deciding factor for choosing one social network to focus on. Get into acquisition, check into social media and see which of those social media platforms is actually working for you and is actually bringing people for you!

You’ll also see if people are naturally finding you on Search Engines, see “Organic Search”.

Behavior

This one I really love. (Yes, I’m a nerd who gets excited about data!). If you go to the Behavior tab and then choose Behavior Flow, you can see how people move through your site.

You’ll see what page they landed on first, where they clicked to next and more importantly, at what point they left. When you know how people move through your website, you can make improvements and changes based on facts. So for example, if you see that people seem to leave your site on a certain page, you can add an interesting link or button that keeps them onsite longer. Or if you see that people randomly go in all directions you can work on limiting distractions so that they end up taking the action you wish them to take.

Those are three things that you can just quickly check in Google Analytics, nothing too complicated, but it just gives you a better idea of what’s happening o your site so that you can build on what’s working and fix what’s not!

Even if your traffic is low or your site is new, make sure your Analytics account is set up and tracking so that when you DO need to check it, you’ll have a history to refer to. Google cannot start tracking until you set it up, so if it’s not in place already, hop to it friend!