Google Analytics (GA) is the industry standard for getting data about your website. There are many other solutions, some of them in real time such as Clicky, (GA has a 1.5 hour delay) but GA is easy to set up and use and gives plenty of information to know more about your website and it’s visitors. 

An important point to make at the outset is to remind ourselves that GA is not about looking just at how many people have visited your site or even admiring the pretty coloured graphs. The data is useless unless we do something with it.

The key thing with GA is not to look at numbers but to use the data to make better business decisions. For example, if you have a high bounce rate (someone visiting your site and leaving almost immediately) from your home page, perhaps the information on this page is confusing. If you are spending a lot of time on social media (Twitter, Facebook) but are seeing little traffic from these sources, then maybe you need to reconsider your marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

Sign up for a free account at the Google Analytics site. You will generate a little piece of code that will have to be manually inserted into each page of your site that you want tracked. If you have a WordPress site, there are a multitude of plugins that do this automatically for you. Ultimate GA is the one I use.

Set Up Goals and Conversions

Next, set up some Goals. Goals are useful to measure whether visitors are interacting on your site they way you want them to. For example, a goal could be to measure how many people sign up to your mailing list or how many visitors click on a Buy Now button.

To set up a Goal, visit the Settings button (the little gear icon on the right) and choose the Profile you want to set up a Goal for. Click on Goals and then set up your desired Goal. The screenshot below shows a set up for a mailing list subscribe. The destination URL is the URL of the subscribe confirmation page. 

You can also set up sales funnels to see where in the process your potential customers are dropping off. For example, do they get to the payment page and then leave? Perhaps you are not offering the right payment plan or perhaps this page looks unsecure. Use your analytics data to ensure you don’t loose potential revenue.

Learn More About Your Visitors

You can use GA to analyse data on demographics, specifically location and language. If you are seeing a lot of visitors from a certain country, it might be worthwhile having parts of your site translated.

Behaviour is an interesting addition to GA. This tracks if visitors are new or returning. You can then break this down by secondary criteria such as traffic source (see screenshot). This way you can see if there are any influencing factors to people returning to your site. You can also look at Engagement and see how long people are staying on your site.

Use the Browser and Mobile data to see what web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc) and mobile platforms people are using to view your site. Sort by bounce rate to highlight any potential problems with certain browsers or mobiles.

Look at where your Traffic is coming from. Apart from search and direct traffic, what are your top referring sites? For me it tends to be this blog, Twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn.

Have a look at your top Landing Pages. Where are people seeing their first page? Are these pages doing your business justice? Are there clear calls to action for new visitors?

You can track email links (for example in an email newsletter) using Google’s URL Tool. Do a / b testing on your email blasts and see which one is driving more traffic to your website.

Troubleshooting with Google Analytics

Use GA to highlight page level problems. If you're seeing a high bounce rate from a particular page, have a think about why? Is there information missing?

Use GA to highlight unusual activity. Set up Alerts and you will get an email if an event is triggered. For example, if traffic is less than usual this might highlight that your site is down or if numbers are up, that sales are through the roof!

Use the data from GA to experiment with changes to your website. See if changes to navigation, content or design make a difference to the number of visitors or conversions. Do a before and after and analyse the data.

Final Thoughts

We are all guilty of checking our GA stats obsessively (I know I am) but instead of obsessing over just the numbers, spend a few minutes drilling down into the data and start to see the bigger picture for your business.

[thanks to SEO and web expert Malcom Coles for the inspiration for the post - I attended a great workshop on this last night - thanks Malcolm!]