For every small business owner who has a business website or runs an online business, it is important to learn the different demographics regarding the traffic they get on their website. Google Analytics is maybe the most widely used web analytic software because it is user-friendly and free of cost.
If you find it difficult to analyze all the reports you are getting, Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer’s Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business
The reason why it is important for you to learn web report analysis is the rising role of websites in business generation, especially for small businesses. It is imperative for you to know who visits your website and what drives them there.
When you design a website, you have a specific goal that you want to achieve from that website. It may be selling more products, providing support to customers or advertising different products of any particular industry or a combination of all. So, you need to track how much of your goals are actually being accomplished through your website.
It is not just your primary goal attainment that you need to track. There are other conversions which you need to record, for example if you have a website to sell product you can track the traffic of “Add to Cart” tab. It may not be your primary goal but if someone is having a cart, they are actually planning to come back and make the purchase later.
9 Reports You Must Analyze in Google Analytics
1.Visits You Get
An essential thing to learn is how many visits your website gets on average. You should also analyze the frequency of visits from a single user. You need to see who visits your website and how many times they do it in a particular time period.
2.Location of Your Visitors
Another thing to analyze is the geographical location of your customers. You can learn how many of these visits are local and global. Depending on the type of your business, it will be really helpful for you to know if you are attracting the right audience for example if you are a local business, you are not likely to gain much from global traffic.
3.The Traffic Source
Where are your visitors coming from? This is an important question to ask especially if you are trying to track the performance of different marketing efforts. You need to determine how much of your traffic is directed to your website through your QR codes, a social media application like Hootsuite, Google Adwords or a direct mail campaign so that you can calculate the ROI on each campaign.
4.Content
It is also imperative to learn what type of content is popular and drives the most part of traffic on your website. If you analyze that the content you actually want people to review is the least visited, you surely need to make some changes immediately.
5.Duration
The amount of time each visitor is spending on your website is important to track if they are staying long enough to get sufficient information or just being redirected there accidently. It will help you determining whether your content is relevant to your keyword and interesting.
6.Depth
The depth of each visit determines how many pages a visitor is opening on your website during one visit. It helps you in understanding if your visitor is exploring your website thoroughly or not.
7.Return Customers
You should also determine if you are regularly getting customers returning to your website or not. Return customers indicate the effectiveness and relevance of your website and shows that your desired audience finds your website helpful to their needs.
8.Keywords
Keywords customers used to get to your website tell you what they were looking for when they reached your website. Well-chosen and relevant keywords are necessary to drive the relevant traffic to your website instead of unnecessary traffic.
9.Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the amount of traffic that arrives to your website redirected from another source and leaves immediately from the landing page. Bounce rate will help you determine how many of your visits were actually valid.
10.Google Funnel
Google Funnel reports indicates how many pages your visitor opened before landing on the page you wanted them to open as your main goal. This can help you in determining whether your targeted page is prominent enough or not.
Summary
A small business owner must be able to answer the question “who is visiting my website” if they want to know if their website is serving its purpose or not. Knowing the demographics of your website visitors can be beneficial for a small business.
Google Analytic, a free web analytic tool by Google Apps has made it much easier for small business owners to track their website traffic without being a web expert.