Is your website working? Do you know who’s visiting it?
It’s really rather easy to find out using Google Analytics, which is completely free and pretty easy to set up.
As a bit of a statistics fan and number cruncher, I love scrolling through a Google Analytics report, and the app gives me some fantastic insights into how a marketing strategy or website works. It never ceases to amaze me that businesses don’t check to see if their website attracts visitors and converts sales. After all, if you owned a shop and no one ever walked through the door, you’d begin to question why; it should be the same for your website.
Here are a few tips that I use to understand and engage my clients’ website visitors.
Get number crunching
Google Analytics is great for letting you know how many people are visiting your website for the first time and also how many are returning. It also lets you know if people meander around your pages, or if they just leave after looking in one place. Depending on your business, you can then begin to tailor your content to meet the needs of your customers. So, if you were a funeral director, for example, you probably wouldn’t expect repeat visits to your page, but you might want people to look at a variety of options while they were visiting. On the other hand, a restaurant or jeweller might expect repeat visitors looking all around the site.
How long do they visit for?
Your engagement rate lets you know how long a page visitor spends on your site and also lets you know which content they find interesting. It’s worth noting that Google only registers engagement if the visitor clicks on more than one page (if they leave without doing this, it’s called a ‘bounce’).
Knowing what is causing engagements and bounces keeps you informed as to what your site visitors find interesting. Remember, they found your site interesting enough to click to visit it in the first place, so you already met that need; the messages that you send in your content are the bits that convert that visit to a sale.
How many pages do they visit?
What you really want is for your visitors to look around every part of your website or to at least click through to a couple of other pages. If they aren’t clicking around and the number of pages visited is low, it might be because your call-to-action buttons aren’t in the right places (or you don’t have any). Something as simple as moving a button can make a site far more accessible. Have you checked all the links are working? Internal links on web pages are also important from an SEO perspective.
Did they just bounce back out?
If you imagine your website as a physical shop, a bounce is someone who walks through the door and walks straight back out again. A high bounce rate might mean that there is something particularly uninviting about your website. That could be a poor or badly designed homepage, slow load speed, the fact it isn’t mobile-friendly, or the content on it being off-putting.
Where are your visitors located?
Google Analytics has a fantastic section called ‘Geo’. This tells you where your visitors have come from. Let’s go back to the funeral director. If we imagine that they are based in Kent, having lots of Australian visitors to the site probably means that something is drastically wrong with the website’s SEO, as all these visitors are unlikely to be customers.
On the flip side, if you run an online selling page and suddenly see lots of visits from a different country, you can begin tailoring your content and marketing strategy to meet their needs.
Of course, you may not feel that you have the time or the knowledge to sit down and check your analytics, this is where we come in, we love data and translating it into actions plans and to-do lists for clients. There is no point in having data if you don’t know what it means or have no intention of acting on the results it provides.
