Seven Tips to Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics. Not everyone wakes up in the morning and decides to learn about website marketing, advertising, traffic tracking, etc. But what about the ones who are trying to manage their own site? Having great information is the ideal situation for anyone, but it's pointless if you don't know how to use it. Here is a short, 7 tip list to help you better understand how any analytics system, even Google analytics, works.

1. Knowing your sources of traffic will improve your ability to make decisions

On your dashboard that shows up for google analytics, there will be a pie chart for the label Traffic Sources Overview. PAY ATTENTION! This is perhaps the most important part of having any kind of analytics done. You can do the rest of the google analytics by yourself at 100% but if you understand your site traffic tracking only 50%, your site will suffer. First, there are four types of traffic:

Direct traffic - when a visitor typed your site in directly and went straight to it.

Referring traffic - visitors who have clicked on an ad for your site on other page

Search Engine traffic - when they searched for something, your site showed up on the search results, and they clicked on it

Keywords - shows what words are typed in when your site shows up for search engine results; what search engine spiders look for

This is VERY important for you to understand - if you don't understand which method is pulling in the most traffic, how can you expand on it and increase your site's goals?

2. Part of success is knowing the failures; Bounce Rates aren't good for any site

Your bounce rate is the number of single page visits or when visitors left your site from the landing page. This means these people are glancing at your site, deeming it not important, and skipping it before they even give it a chance to check out your products! It's normal for pages such as the 'Download' page and the 'Buy now' page to have a high bounce rate, so don't worry TOO much about this. But if your homepage has a high bounce rate, there's definitely something wrong. Your landing page is supposed to coax them into looking at other things on the site, perhaps products, perhaps not, and maybe, just maybe, convert them. If your bounce rates are high on any page that is not 'buy now' or 'download', it would be a very good idea to reassess your site content. Maybe it's just not pleasing enough for people to want to look at. Some people find it helpful to put links to products from their other pages on the landing page to try and catch the visitor's attention before they 'bounce'. But you need to figure out a way to lower that bounce rate and increase that conversion rate!

Note: Google Analytics will let you compare your bounce rates to the main site's bounce rates so you can figure out how high or low your bounce rates should be.

3. Referring sites have Personalities, too; they don't all generate the same amount of traffic

Ok, you got THE three biggest fish in the sea: 3 huge corporation sites that everyone and their grandma knows about have links to your site on them. First, appreciate this - it's not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. Second, figure out which one is sending the most clicks your way. Go to your Google Analytics page, click on the tab to the left labelled "Traffic Sources", then go beneath that to click on "Referring Sites". By looking at this, you can figure out which places where are sending the most traffic to your site. Advertising campaigns are really good for showing where the most traffic is coming from.

4. Look at visitor's statistics from other countries to determine your geographical standpoint

By clicking the "Visitors" tab on the left of the page, then "Map Overlay", you get a nice chart to show you where your visitors hail. Great news is: you can write ads and have click ads up on sites that are popular with different countries, based on the popularity of your product with that country. Sell winter clothes to a country that is covered in snow; "target your audience" doesn't just mean gender, age, eye color, etc.

5. Tracking your outgoing links can be useful in determining what's working for your site

You can actually track your links leaving your site! If you have "Buy now" buttons on other sites, you should apply this concept, or if you are concerned about throwing away traffic with the links going out.

6. You can track navigation into and out of pages. This is useful for you to see how your site pages correspond.

Press the tab "Content", then "Top Content". Pick one of the pages by selecting it from the list. Then hit "Navigation Summary". You can see which pages are attracting your visitors from other pages on your site. It's like tracking your incoming traffic, but all on your site.

7. Get your Report Now, anywhere, anytime, no hassle. This helps you to determine important things over a certain amount of time.

Google Analytics has an amazing system to report data to you. Get reports on segmentation, transaction, referral path, and adgroup any time an opportunity approaches. You can see exactly what transactions are linked to keywords, ads, referrals, whatever they may be. You can also see the number of conversions for each goal of yours, and the revenue.