Google Analytics Tips

Most importantly you will identify the traffic sources that are sending you most of the traffic. Google analytics can offer complex reports and views about specific data. Below are some basics to get you started in using Google analytics and the most important sections.

Visitor Traffic

Knowing how many visitors are accessing your website is valuable data since traffic on your website is one of the most important fundamental key elements to having a successful website. Thus, in Google Analytics you can set a specific time range and view all the people that visited the website. Lots of other metrics are available such as the total of pages viewed, the average duration of a visit, number of pages viewed per visit and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is an important metric since it shows the percentage of visits that go into only one page of the website. This means that the users exit the web page without going into further pages which may be a result of the website not being relevant, or the users may have found what they were looking for. For instance a local business website may get a lot of visits from user who enter the Contact Us page to obtain the telephone number, email or address.

Traffic Sources

A lot of people who visit your website will enter from another source. If a user clicks on a link from a local listing website that website will be the source from where the user entered. All these sources will be listed under the traffic sources section as ‘referrals’ including with number of direct traffic. Direct traffic includes those users that visit the website by inserting the URL of the website inside a web browser.

Analysing this data can further increase your website traffic. For instance, if you are advertising on a specific website you can identify the amount of visits from that website. Identifying popular sources of traffic such as search engines and social media sites can help you identify opportunities and invest budgets accordingly.

Search Keywords

Google Analytics is a popular tool for search engine optimisation (SEO). It shows the searches people are using to enter the website using certain keywords such as the website name, business name and other business related keywords. This is one major element that one should consider during an SEO campaign. Since increasing ranking and getting better visibility should increase traffic through keyword searches. An important keyword to take note of is the keyword listed as ‘(not provided)’. These are all those keywords that are searched when a user is logged into a Google product. Under this scenario, the specific keyword is hidden by Google and shown as ‘(not provided)’.

Website Content

Which web pages are the most popular content that people are browsing on your website? Under the content section in Google Analytics you can view the top webpages of a website. Thus you can identify products or services that may be more popular than others. In addition, amongst the metrics that Google analytics provide you can view specific metric such as the page views, bounce rate and average time of that specific page.

Remember that to have access to this data the Google Analytics tracking code must be implemented on all web pages of the website. Then Google Analytics will be able to track visitor data from when the code was implemented, and not before!

Conrad Bugeja is a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant and Pay-Per-Click Consultant at Alert eBusiness Internet Marketing Division - www.alertemarketing.com