Google Analytics may seem pretty easy and straightforward to use, but many people fail to optimize the full service it provides. To become a smarter GA user, heed the following tips and tricks from Google Analytics professionals.
1. Take advantage of helpful but commonly underutilized features such as the Mobile User Report and the Queries Report. How are you supposed to make the most of these two?
- The Mobile User Report – There’s a good chance that more people are viewing your site on a mobile device instead of a desktop, so you want to ensure that they’ll be happy with your site by making it as mobile-friendly as possible. Not only will your mobile visitors have a good experience, but Google will also accordingly reward you for it.
- The Queries Report – This tells you the key phrases people are using to get to your site, the click-through rate, as well as how you rank for each key phrase. Information from this section will guide you on how to tweak your content so you can be bumped up to the top/first page of search results.
2. Use Conversions to best gauge the success of your content or campaigns. This is perceived by experts to be the most powerful among the GA metrics in evaluating your marketing campaign. To maximise the use of this feature, set up goals in your GA. For instance, you can send visitors who filled out your contact form to a thank you page. You can base your goal on this. Through such a measure, you can see which marketing effort is converting the most number of visitors into leads.
3. Understand the significance of bounce rate. A high bounce rate is not always a bad thing. It really depends on the page in question. For instance, a high bounce rate on a blog page is nothing to fret over. It usually means that people searched for answers, went to your page upon search engine recommendation, found what they were looking for, and left. The value here is in building trust and by providing useful, helpful content, you are able to accomplish that. A high bounce rate on a landing page, however, is an entirely different matter. If you’re sending people to a page designed to convince them to buy or sign up and they’re leaving right away, you obviously need to make some changes. It could be that the page was confusing and that your call-to-action wasn’t clear or appealing. Fix it to make it more effective.
4. Find out which metrics you should be paying attention to. It really depends on what’s important to your business. For instance, if you’re a B2B site, you should keep a close eye on the Behavior Flow Reports to find out how many visitors become leads, where they come from, and how they’re flowing through your site. Meanwhile, if you’re an e-commerce site, you best focus on which products are selling the most, the marketing efforts that lead to those sales, what your cart abandonment rate is, and which channels generate the most sales.
5. Use GA’s handy little shortcut button. There are reports that you know that you’ll be monitoring closely, so click “shortcut” for each one so that they’ll be included in the left column, making them just a click away – no need to dig through Analytics to get to the data you want.
Hopefully, these tips and tricks from Google Analytics professionals will guide you not only in your use of the tool, but also in improving the performance of your website.
As always, if you have any questions or need help with your marketing campaigns, be sure to contact our Team at MGR Consulting Group.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR)
