5 Ways to Improve Your Website with

Google Analytics

IntroductionGoogle Analytics is one of the most

valuable free tools available for website owners, providing detailed data about

traffic and visitors which can be used to evaluate how your content performs and

attracts new visitors. In this post, we’ll look at some of the key metrics Google

Analytics provides and show how these can be used to improve your website.

Use traffic data to identify underperforming

channelsGoogle Analytics’ acquisition data shows you

how much traffic you have acquired from each of

the different channels. These are: organic traffic,

e.g. visitors who have found you from search

engines; direct traffic, e.g. visitors who typed

your URL into their browser; referral traffic,

those who have clicked on links on other sites;

and social traffic, i.e., those who have come from

social media platforms.

With all this valuable information at your

fingertips, it makes it much easier to understand

where your website’s strengths and weaknesses

lie. You might, for example, find that you

perform well on search engines but that you need

to put more effort into increasing your social

media traffic.

Find which pages get the most visitors

By looking at the Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages

data, you’ll get a ranked list showing which pages get

the most visits over your chosen timescale. You can

also drill down further by using the ‘secondary

dimension’ tool to discover where the visitors for each

page comes from.

The importance of this data is that it enables you to get

a better understanding of your website’s content.

For example, if pages are not getting much organic

traffic it hints that you might need to look at your SEO

or rewrite the content to make it more useful to your

visitors. Looking at your most successful content and

figuring out why it attracts traffic well, can help you

make improvements across your site.

How low is your bounce rate?

The bounce rate is the term used to describe the

percentage of visitors who only visit one page before

leaving. Whilst no web page will ever get a 0%

bounce rate, some types of pages, such as product

pages, are more likely to get high bounce rates. If

someone wants something specific, they’ll quickly

scoot off back to Google if they don’t find what

they’re looking for.

High bounce rates, however, are a cause for concern,

especially on your homepage or key landing pages. If

this is the case, it’s an indication that you may need

to make improvements to the content or the design in

order to get visitors to move to other parts of your

website.

It could be that your content is not relevant, that the

page isn’t attractive or easy to read, there may

annoying popups, or the page may even load too

slowly for the user to hang around.

Find issues from analysing session data

The pages per session data shows you how many pages

the average user visits when they land on your website.

Depending on the nature of your site, you’ll have an

idea of how many pages you would like each visitor to

see. If you’ve an eCommerce site or blog, for example,

you’ll want a visitor to visit lots of pages, if your site

has only a couple of service pages then, obviously,

you’ll be looking at a smaller figure.

The importance of this data is that it will tell you if you

are meeting your optimum figure.

The time on page data (found in the behaviour section)

tells you how much time the average visitor stays on

each page. This can be very useful in understanding

how well visitors engage with your content and if they

actually read all the page. It could indicate boring or

badly written content, information being hard to find or

something off-putting being mentioned part way

through.

Use behaviour flow to discover conversion

barriersIf you run an online business, there will be a sales

pathway that you want your customers to take as they go

through your website.

Using Google Analytics’ behaviour flow tool, you will be

able to see how visitors actually move through your site:

where they land, what pages they visit as they move and

where they exit the site.

Although it is natural to see a drop-off of visitor numbers

as they head towards the payment page, one of the

biggest benefits of this tool is that it clearly shows where

the biggest drop-off points are.

Understanding where these are can help you eradicate

barriers to sales or other goals. Although it is up to you to

determine the cause, the data will tell you if there is an

obstacle at that point in the process which prevents users

completing the sale. Removing that obstacle is a clear

way to improve your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for

helping businesses improve their

websites. It’s not designed to give all the

answers, but it does provide an insight

into where traffic comes from and how

visitors behave when on-site. From this,

you can understand what is working well

and learn which areas need to be

improved upon.