Any Website Visits Lately? Use Google Analytics to Find Out
How to Measure the Number of People Visiting Your Website
You’ve spent an enormous amount of time and effort building a website for your business. Content is written, read, edited and reviewed while the post layout undergoes quality control repeatedly. How will you know if your website gets unique visits? Is your online marketing strategy effective in driving traffic to your social media pages or your actual store?
Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you determine if your website is successful in attracting and keeping visitors interested. It can show you how people found your website, what pages they visited and how you can better improve their visit experience. This freebie from Google uses Internet ‘cookies’ to gather information about users’ site visits.
What questions are answered when you use Google Analytics?
- Did your website have any new visitors? Did previous visitors come again?
- Are there visitor trends you need to watch out?
- How long do users stay on your website? What pages do they frequent?
- What’s the physical location of your visitors? How about their browser? How fast is their Internet connection?
- How did they find your website? Were your SEO campaigns and keywords effective enough?
When using Google Analytics for the first time, you need a Google account to access your website data. Once you’ve created your account, visit http://www.google.com/analytics. Website details will be taken to help with report production. You’ll be given a tracking code, which you’ll have to paste on your pages. This tracking code will help Google Analytics keep watch over your website.
Once your account is set up, you’ll be able to study the data generated and learn how your social marketing strategy fares. But first, you have to set up “Goals,” which you can use to compare your conversion rates. These rates will help you learn whether your website is helping you succeed in reaching your marketing goals. Example goals are: gathering subscriptions for newsletters, estimate or quote requests, Contact Us queries and online purchase transactions.
If you have a high conversion rate, then your website is efficient in getting your visitors behave as you want them to. Assisted social conversion is the number of conversions a social network contributed to your website. A scenario becomes an “assist” when a user visits your site, leaves without converting then comes back to convert in the following visits. Last interaction conversion means when users visit your site and ‘converts.’ This is counted as ‘last clicks’ since the users meet the goal.
What do those circles in the Social Value page mean? According to Christopher Penn’s interpretation of the social reports, these circles denote whether your website and social media pages are:
Balanced –Your website and social media pages are synchronized. They work well together in helping your reach your marketing goals.
Socially Broke – Either your social media pages or website is not meeting your business goals. You need to redo your page and optimize it further to start reaping more benefits.
Over-Reliant Social –Your social media projects drive a high rate of customer traffic to your website. There is a danger in this, however, because once the social media site shuts down or you get banned, it will difficult to recoup such traffic again.
Chatty – Your social media efforts are effective, yet your website fails to get enough conversions.
The I in Team: Your social media campaigns are not efficient enough in driving customer traffic.
Analyzing website traffic will benefit you in the end. If you neglect this particular feature, you are losing out on ways you can further improve your marketing efforts. With the use of Google Analytics, you can drive more visitors to your website and to your store.
References:
http://www.zoommetrix.com/google-analytics/kpis-you-must-know-in-google-analytics-and-meanings/
http://online-behavior.com/analytics/googleplus
http://www.christopherspenn.com/2012/04/how-to-measure-if-social-media-marketing-is-working-for-you/