Knowing what your website visitors are doing when they are looking at your website is the only way you can successfully optimize your site to reach your goals. Using web analytic software such as Google Analytics can provide valuable insight about your website and exactly what your site’s visitors are doing. Without any information as to what your site’s visitors are doing, you will not be able to make the necessary changes to your website in order to increase your conversion rate. If you really want to be successful you should take an Analytics course, but here are three tips you can use to get you started with Google Analytics.
Create a Conversion Funnel
In order to get the most out of your website, there needs to be a specific conversion goal in place such as getting a visitor to purchase an item, sign up for a newsletter, or pick up the phone and call your business. With a clearly defined conversion goal in place on your website, you will be able to easily determine if your website is meeting its goals by the number of conversions you are seeing. If your site is not performing as well as you had hoped, you can create a conversion funnel within Google Analytics to see where you can optimize your website.
The conversion funnel feature makes it very easy to understand the data that is being collected on your website by Google Analytics in regards to your conversion goal. This tool is a must use for any Google Analytics beginner who is looking to increase their website’s conversions.
View Traffic Sources
Another feature a Google Analytics beginner will want to use on a regular basis is the traffic sources tool. This feature enables you to see exactly where your website’s traffic is coming from on the Internet. If you notice one traffic source is producing a lot of unique visitors to your website, you can focus your efforts on obtaining more visitors from that traffic source.
If you have been trying to drive traffic to your site via a specific source such as social media website and do not see any traffic from that source in your Google Analytics account, you can make changes to your promotion strategy or abandon that traffic source all together.
Use Custom Reports
The Custom Reporting feature is a great tool to use when you want to pay close attention to your Google Analytics account. This feature will email you a custom report at your desired interval. Whether you want to receive reports daily, weekly, or monthly, you can set up this feature according to your desires.
Also, you can use this tool to have several different types of reports emailed to you as frequently as you would like. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of your websites and the various promotion strategies you are employing along with your conversion techniques.
Using Google Analytics to monitor your website’s traffic is an excellent way to improve the success of your site. Creating a conversion funnel, paying attention to successful traffic sources, and creating custom reports are all great ways you can use Google Analytics to help you run a more successful website.