The Google Analytics (GA) microscope can be tweaked to focus on various aspects of user behaviour. The software is one of the best ecommerce solutions to come out in the last five years.
From a distance, its dashboard displays the amount of visitors your website has received in the last month – using numeric data and a progression graph. GA also identifies how many of those visitors are unique (never visited your site before), allowing you to track your website’s growth in popularity.
Average page visits are also highlighted here – giving you an insight into how many times a user clicks through to multiple pages on your website before leaving. The average time spent on your website is recorded too. You can view the ‘Visitors Flow’ chart to see the typical clicking journey your users are taking on your site.
Zoom in a little further and you can view this same data on a daily or weekly basis – which is perfect if your SME website is running a special campaign on a particular day and you want to see how that affected performance.
Google can pinpoint the country where each user of your website is based. Using this demographic information on GA, you can identify where in the world your website is having the greatest impact. This can allow you to tweak the site to take advantage of exposure in certain areas, or broaden your appeal to a larger worldwide audience – this of course depends on the needs of your business.
Your target market may be specified to certain locations – for example, a laptop retailer will naturally want to target businesspeople in major cities like London and Manchester. With Google Analytics, they could measure their website’s appeal to those areas, monitoring user behaviour just like before, but with much more precision.
Google introduced its own web browser in 2008, Google Chrome. However, GA is not limited to analysing data from this browser alone – it incorporates all the major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. Because of this, you can see which browser the majority of your visitors are using and ensure your website looks perfect when found in that particular browser (website appearances often vary between browsers).
The comprehensive amount of data on GA tails off into stats on social interactions, mobile visitors and more. If you have advertisements on the web that link back to your site, you can see how many users clicked on them to arrive on your targeted page.
There is a lot to take in with Google Analytics and this blog has just got under the surface. One of the newer features to note is how GA allows you to set conversion goals – this means you can track exactly how many visitors are actively ordering your product or signing up to your service.
Online marketers, like the BT Marketing Solutions team specialise in harvesting all the data from Google Analytics and meticulously interpreting the stats, before providing you with recommendations of how to improve the efficiency of your site – making it easy for you to take action and enhance your online success on a whole.
