Google Analytics can be intimidating at first, but once you get started, you’ll find that you can use it to help better your business and increase your online presence, and therefore your sales. It can even be fun!
WARNING: Once you get comfortable navigating this tool, you’re probably going to get sucked down a rabbit hole and become obsessed with it.
1. Find who’s viewing your site- and how often
This step is probably the most useful. After signing in, open the Audience tab on the left side. Under overview, play around. You can see where your visitors are, and tailor this to your content. For instance, if most of your viewers are from Charlotte, they’re most likely going to be interested in things that are relevant to the Queen City. Under the Demographics tab, you can check out the most popular gender, age and user interest categories. So if your most common viewers are women in the 45-54 age range, think about what would most appeal to them when writing articles or posting photos.
2. How did they get there?
You can find how people got to your website by using the Acquisition tab on the left. Click on Overview to see the Channels visitors used to get to your site. Organic Search means they found your website through a search engine, like Google. If you click on this heading, it will show you the search terms typed in by the user. If you see that users are searching for something in particular, like “plaid scarf”, then use this as an opportunity to capitalize on that. You can also select the social (pretty self-explanatory) or referral options. By seeing what websites your traffic comes from, you can decide if ads or blog partnerships may be a good idea.
3. New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors
When using Audience Overview, the home screen will show a pie chart of new visitors vs. returning visitors. Returning visitors will probably always be a little smaller than new visitors, but set a goal to make this number larger. You can also see how long visitors stay on your site, and view the bounce rate, which is the number of visitors that leave your website without browsing any further than one page.
By knowing your customer, you’ll know what to provide to please them and keep them returning to your site. I highly recommend setting up a blog and social media presence to drive traffic back to your site as well. If you discover that the greatest visitor demographic is millennials, start a blog with shopping links that has humor and plenty of visuals. Using Google Analytics simply helps you anticipate your viewer’s needs so that you can be more successful with your business. Try playing around on the site- and don’t forget, I warned you that you’d have fun (and possibly lose hours of your life)!
This article was originally published at Giftsanddec.com, by author Lauren Davidson.
Recent Comments