5 Tricks to Understanding Google Analytics

By Eileen Meyer Tackling the world of technology these days can seem overly daunting. New tech tools have become readily available to the masses monthly, and it has become vital to keep up –especially when running a business. Being the virtual powerhouse it is, Google provides us with an easy to manage analytic system with real-time updates to the largest business tool that companies have seen this generation: the website. Beginning in the late 90s the World Wide Web took off and the dot-com bubble began with start-up online businesses popping up. However, like any industry boom the bubble popped in 2001 and several online businesses failed, leaving a few online retailers to blossom. Google’s search engine pulled through the dot-com bust and found success in developing a business model that helped make the World Wide Web a more compelling experience. Since 2002, information exchange through a website medium has become vital to a business. With a number of systems at our finger-tips to help build the perfect site, managing them has become critical to businesses across the world. Adapting and retaining their online dominance, Google created Google Analytics –the easy to use website analysis tool generating statistics on every visitor to your site. With this tool, companies can manage, develop, and tailor their online presence to best assist their business. To keep up with the internet savvy, allow me to disclose a few key features and tricks to make the most of Google Analytics for your business and gage your marketing efforts. 1.       Get to know your Dashboard The Dashboard is the first page you will see when entering Google Analytics. This location offers a snap shot of activity for your site during your preferred time. For example, you can look at the past 30 days detailing site usage including: visits, page views, bounce rate, average time on site and percent of new visits. The visitors feature displays the amount of times one person has visited your site within your designated dashboard time frame, whereas page views is the total hits the site received independent of the person. Page views and bounce rates can often be misrepresented because their values are averages. Page view represents the average pages within your site visited during the time spent on your website and a bounce rate is how often a visitor will leave the site after viewing only one page. However, if your website is simply a one page blog, these analytic tools become invaluable. Additionally, average time on site will only be recorded if a visitor clicks to a second page. Most important to your business’s marketing efforts is the new visitors feature. This element will provide insight to which percentages of visitors are new during your specific time period, helping to detail successes of any traditional or online marketing campaigns. Getting to know these easy features on your Dashboard can help even a beginner gain insight to the success of their company’s online presence. 2.       Know the importance of Content Overview The content tab of Google Analytics can serve as an extremely useful tool as it shed light on what content is driving the most traffic and holding a visitor to the page. Here you can view your top content with a bounce rate lower than 50% and visitor times. If your times read between two to three minutes, then your pages are doing very well. You can also discover your top landing pages, which details the pages visitors land on if a raw key word search in Google is performed. This tool can direct your business to where better content is in order to increase time on a page and website. Included in content overview is display of your top exit pages. This tool will help you know which pages drive visitors to leave your site. With this data, you can optimize that page in hopes for visitors to remain on your website for a longer period of time. 3.       Educate yourself on traffic sources Google Analytics allows you to view where your visitors are coming from. Through traffic overview, the analytic system will provide top 25 key words in a year that bring visitors to your site and what other sites are leading internet users to come to yours. Through this information, marketers can better understand where ad placement will see a higher success rate and what key words are important to tag within their content of pages. Additionally, the traffic sources overview will break down whether visitors emerge from a natural Google search, partnership, or direct traffic. This can help your business identify how well traditional advertising is working, driving direct traffic and if a partnerships have proven valuable. In addition to this, you can explore from which regions of the world people are driven to your site, helping give insight to where there is need for an increased presence based on your target markets. 4.       Utilize Site Overlay This tab will open a new web page with your home site displayed. This will show the number of clicks on links located on your home page, helping to display if promotions are working or what activities visitors are participating in when they first land on your site. When setting promotional or ad goals for your business via online sources this can be an extremely useful tool, as your homepage sees the most visitors. 5.       Export Data Easily For some folks, it is important to move specific data received from Google Analytics into a handy excel document for further company website analysis. However, more often than not you have thousands of cells with a limitation 500 when exporting as CSV to an excel document.  To avoid this annoyance, add “&limit=” to the end of the URL and all of your data can export onto one sheet in excel.  The view on the page will only show 500, but the actual download will have all the data you need.  This handy trick can help you relay all the information you have gathered from any feature of Google Analytics in an organized document.