Understanding your website visitors’ behavior is an important part of focusing your marketing strategy and sharpening your competitive edge. Google Analytics is a free service designed to offer digital markers a simple way to monitor their online performance and improve their rank in search engines.
While driving traffic to your website is important, it’s also crucial to have a thorough understanding of your visitors’ habits. Google Analytics collects data from your website visitors and compiles it into an easy-to-read report, giving you detailed insights about your online audience. Google Analytics can not only tell you when and how often your customers visit, it also offers a suite of 230 other metrics that website owners can use in their online marketing strategy. Best of all, these tools are completely free of charge for website owners to use.
Below, you’ll find a list of the top five Google Analytics metrics that business marketers can use to glean useful information.
1. Organic Search Traffic
The organic search traffic metric is a key measurement for search engine optimization. Organic searches are searches from visitors that found your site through something other than a direct link. This includes visitors who searched for a specific product type, question, or some other query that led them to your site. The organic search traffic metric shows you the keywords and search strings people used to find your website. This is helpful to know because it tells you that your customers’ needs are driving targeted traffic to your site. Understanding what type of information they’re searching for can help you optimize your keywords, and drive even more traffic to your site.
2. Traffic Sources
By analyzing traffic source information, you can create a strategy to maximize the number of visitors to your website. The traffic sources metric shows how many visitors have accessed your site and how they accessed it. Different traffic sources include search traffic, referrals, organic searches, and direct traffic. Digital marketers can use this metric to make decisions about where to best market their website. Instead of wasting time and energy marketing on sites that aren’t returning traffic, you can concentrate on the ones that provide a maximum ROI on their efforts. With the right type of content on the right platforms, you can reach your target market and encourage them to visit your website.
3. Audience Location
Many business owners overlook the value of knowing your website visitors’ geographical location. Google Analytics provides this information with the audience location metric. When you know where most of your audience is located, you can start to make crucial decisions with respect to developing both new and existing markets. The audience location metric can show you whether you’re marketing in the right place, or if there’s another emerging market opportunity you can tap into.
4. Audience Engagement
With this metric, you can gauge how effective your content is in catching and keeping your audience’s attention. Google uses a few key data sets to analyze this: number of page views, visit duration, and number of pages accessed. This is where having great, well-written content comes into play. Adding useful content and placing carefully crafted calls to action encourage visitors to stay longer.
5. Social Media Traffic
Today, social networks are an important factor in driving traffic to your website. The social media metric reveals how effective your social media marketing efforts are by offering detailed information on the source of each social network referral. Using the social media metric, you can analyze which of your social media pages or posts are garnering the most response. This will help you streamline your social media marketing strategy, freeing up your time and energy for other marketing tasks.
Google Analytics offers great free tools to help you build your online business and focus your digital marketing strategy. If you’ve been looking for an easy, cost-effective way to gather marketing data about your web audience, Google Analytics is definitely worth looking at. Checking the above metrics regularly lets you know if your current plan is working, and helps you decide what’s needed to steer your marketing in the right direction. By simply monitoring and measuring the right metrics, you’ll be able to evaluate your current business plan and implement new growth strategies.