What is Google Analytics for?
Google Analytics enables users to track up to 200 different metrics to measure how their websites are performing. Using Google Analytics, users can track who their customers are, where they live, what websites or keywords are doing the best, and how much traffic each page is getting. These are all essential tools for helping users to grow and improve their website.
Google Analytics is best for:
- The person who wants to start understanding what is actually happening on their website
- Business owners who are trying to optimize their website traffic and conversion rates
- The person who wants to learn social media marketing as a side hustle or career choice
Things People Should Know When Setting Up Google Analytics
Plan to fail, fail to plan. Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to create measurable goals for your website. Being able to track how people are landing on your page, as well as leaving will give you insight into how you can optimize your page. Do you ever wonder what type of people are landing on your page? Or how come people aren’t signing up as often for your newsletter as you’d like? Well, Google Analytics can help you.
The trouble with hustle culture these days is that there is too much emphasis on “just getting started” but not enough to parlay the early passion and excitement into a long term and consistent strategy that requires daily execution and tracking and experimentation.
Figuring out how to optimize your website takes months and months of experimentation. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to make quick fixes, but stay consistent.
A few terms you should know:
Bounce Rate - A website’s bounce rate measures how many visitors leave a page without performing a specific action like visiting another page, clicking or signing up for something. In its simplest form, it is how fast someone is leaving your site once they land on your page.
The higher the bounce rate, the worst your page is doing. This means your page is not interesting, relevant or useful to your audience and Google will not share your page to your target audience. I like to think of a bounce rate like I would of a party. If I threw a party and my guests left within seconds of getting to my party and “bounced”, it’d be a sign I didn’t throw a very good party. Or maybe that they weren’t the right party member.
_According to Semrush:_
A bounce rate of 56% to 70% is on the high side, although there could be a good reason for this, and 41% to 55% would be considered an average bounce rate. An optimal bounce rate would be in the 26% to 40% range.
__New Vs Returning Visitors : __
New visitors are exactly what the name sounds like, users that have not visited your site before the time period specified. Returning visitors are those that have made at least one visit to your page before. A key metric to look out for is to see how many returning visitors you have. Returning visitors is a great metric for seeing how useful and engaging your website is.
__Direct Traffic and Referral Traffic : __
Direct traffic comes from users who type in or click on your URL. Referral traffic comes from another site, like social media or a search engine.
Once you begin to understand these metrics, you’ll begin to think about how your website is run and how you can optimize your website by tracking Google Analytics even more. Are there pages that can be updated to include stronger keywords? Do you have pages where the SIGN UP button is moved both below and above the fold?
All of these will allow you to consistently optimize your site. This will also contribute to understanding your target audience even more so. As long as you keep track of the data consistently, you'll be able to notice trends and optimize accordingly. Good luck!
