Getting the Most out of Your GA Account

Once you’ve setup your GA account successfully, now you can start looking at the data as it comes in. Before you start trying to add a lot of bells and whistles to your account it’s best to get used to how the data is measured in your GA dashboard.

Where Does Your Site Land Within Your Industry?

With GA you can determine whether or not your stats match up with your industry. If you’ve selected the right category for your website, you should be able to use the “Benchmarking” option to take a look at how your numbers compare with everyone else in your industry that use Google Analytics.

The Map Overlay is a Neat Feature

You can see where your audience is coming from with the map overlay. It’s really interesting to find out that most of your audience comes from someplace you did not expect. Sometimes, you’re right on target with your assumptions and sometimes you’re not. That’s why it’s always good to look at the numbers.

Do You Have Returning Website Visitors?

This number is a good indicator that you’re publishing a lot of interesting content that is on target with your audience’s wants, needs, and desires. Ideally, you want a good mix of new versus repeat visitors. But, having repeat visitors is a great sign that your targeting is on pointe.

What Language Do Your Visitors Speak?

Probably, they’re going to speak the language that you do and that your website is in. But, sometimes for certain types of niches, you’ll find a lot of people you did not expect. Once you know for example, that half your visitors speak a different language it might be time to come out with a site especially for them.

Which Browser Do Your Visitors Most Often Use?

You may not think this is relevant but the browsers, operating systems and that type of thing matter a great deal when you’re creating functionality for your visitors. Knowing this information can help you optimize your website for the type of browser most often used. For example, if 90 percent of your users access your site using an iPad, what can you do to make the experience even better for them?

All of this information is important to you because you can optimize your website based on the information that you gather. It may take a few weeks of visitors coming to your site before you have enough data to make changes, but you can use some of the information immediately, such as bounce rate and referring sites.

Getting Deeper With Google Analytics

You can go deeper than this with GA. You can find out what keywords people used to come to your site. If you know a few of these keywords you can use them as a starting point to get even more visitors by optimizing pages for these keywords and related keywords.

For example, if you have a fashion related website and your website is ranking well for the keyword “little black dress” what are some other ways you can capitalize on this?

You can link to an affiliate that sells a little black dress.
You can write an article about little black dresses.
You can create a video tutorial showing ways to wear a little black dress.
You can create a roundup blog post about little black dresses across the net.

The possibilities are endless when you find out which keywords are getting visitors to your site.

Better Campaign Tracking

When you’re ready to run pay per click, banner, newsletter, or other types of advertising, you can use Google Analytics to track it all. This is through Advanced Google but it can be very helpful to ensure that you’re doing all that you can to make your campaigns successful.

You Can Even Track Different Ad Versions

If you use Google AdWords for your ads, there is a tab specifically to track how well your ads are doing including checking different versions of the same advertisement.

The opportunities that Google Analytics brings are really unparalleled even among third-party choices for analytics. Keep in mind since Google Search still rules the roost, you’ll be doing a really good thing for your business to use Google Analytics to help guide you toward a better quality website and experience for your users.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics is something every website or blog should implement. With GA you can find out so many things. Such as, who visited your website, from where, what browser they used, and even their screen resolution. You can also determine their demographics which can be useful in marketing.

With GA you can find out what people do once they land on your website. How long are they staying? What pages are they reading most? What keywords are bringing people to your website and which website is referring the most traffic?

Think about this, if you know when people are visiting your site, you can maximize your posting schedule for new content. If you know where they came from, and you find out that you have a lot of visitors from a country that speaks another language you can determine if it would be profitable to translate your website into that language.

If you know that a place you guest blogged for six months is not sending you any traffic, you can choose to discontinue blogging there and start doing something else with your time.

Also, consider that you can find out where your visitors are clicking, what articles they’re reading so that you can write more about that particular topic. For example, if you have posted recipes for apples in the past and it seems like they get the most traffic during a certain time of year; you can make sure that you get more recipes up for apples during that time next year.

Now What?

Knowing the data isn’t enough, though. You must gather the data, analyze it and determine what you can do with it. Make changes as the data indicates and then keep tweaking until you have created a traffic generating site that works like clockwork.

If you haven’t got involved with analytics yet, and you want to earn more money in less time, then get started right now by installing Google Analytics (BASIC) and starting with that. Once you have learned the ins and outs of Basic Google Analytics you can start using advanced features for even more bang for your buck.

Need Help with GA?

If this seems overwhelming to you, consider hiring a professional to set it up for you. There are a lot of people who have been certified and received Google Analytics Individual Qualification.

Contact me if you need help with installing and understanding Google Analytics, I consult by appointment only.

Google Analytics: A Basic Overview

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