Google Analytics, your business website adviser.
Using data to analyse where your company or website is doing well , and where it is failing is absolute key. In google analytics you literally have a wide range of data sets and metrics telling you : “This country likes your page , you have a issue with iPhone users , your website is mobile friendly, this specific page is dropping most of your traffic flow on route to the point of sale” and so much more.
Interpreting data is a absolutely necessary skill for any business owner or web master. Lets take a quick analysis of this very basic snapshot from my analytics account. Changes in data sets are usually a result of a outside or inside influence , if you make a change to your brand , website or product its important to start a new data set. Monitoring it against the previous periods ( oh look Google analytics does that for you ) to determine the effect of your change.
My website’s analytics
Website analytics for my design agency, New perspective Studio.
First thing we note here is the massive drop in traffic , that is bad right. Website designers and developers are always talking about getting more traffic. The second metric “sessions” have barely increased to my website. Most web developers or business owners would go into full panic mode but lets take a closer look.
Interpreting my website metrics
Like i said before changes are usually influenced by a outside or inside factor , to fully understand the data you need to understand what change is the influence on this data.
In this case it was a title change and some content adjustments. I narrowed down my title and content. So while most of us would be thinking these are bad metrics they are infarct exactly what i was aiming for. Less traffic. note the drop in ‘bounce rate” ( this is how many users land on your website and make no interaction ) and then note the increase in session duration.
Prior to my change my website title was not reflecting what my content was trying to sell. The result of this was many users who would enter my website looking for a product or service , to find i dont really have it, this meant my content didn’t align correctly with my website title and vice versa.
By changing my title to what i expect the users that i am targeting search for , i got just that . More users landing on my site for a specific query.
The drop in the bounce rate metric shows that they did indeed find what they where looking for , and the prolonged sessions showed that more interest was shown and time spent consuming my content.
In short i dropped a few hundred tyre kickers for a few more clients that convert.
I took it a step further and viewed the behaviour flow chart and found that on my intended path for a sale one page in particular was dropping a higher rate of users. I investigated to find a not so friendly bug in my navigation bar on that page.
I debugged the coding and now i had a bigger flow of users to my contact form ( the conversion point ) .
The bonus to this is that google ( yes i give it a the attributes of a living breathing entity ) actually likes to see this. If google see’s your conversions are going up it considers your website more and more relevant to that query resulting in a better search engine ranking position. They are after all a corporation and want to give their clients the best possible service by providing the most relevant results.
Your bounce rate reduction , and session time increase just told google , look my website is pretty relevant for this query , consider me a little more next time somebody asks.
As a result in the past 7 days i have had a increase in website, logo and seo services sales and requests by almost three fold. I now have to consider outsourcing , but that would be for another article.
Knowledge ( or data is indeed ) power.
By New Perspective Design.
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There are many great online articles on the subject of analytics within the web design and business industry. We simply say what we observe. Thanks for your kind comment.
Howdy! This is kind of off topic but I need some guidance from an established blog. Is it very hard to set up your own blog? I’m not very techincal but I can figure things out pretty quick. I’m thinking about creating my own but I’m not sure where to start. Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks
There are some fascinating time limits on this article but I don’t know if I see all of them heart to heart. There’s some validity however I’ll take hold opinion until I look into it further. Good article , thanks.
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The are a ton of online google articles i=on how to defectively run a online blog, whilst there are a few common rules its very industry dependent and target market dependent. If you are writing say for tech guys they want schematics details, you average user may get bored and want you to get the point with your content.
Well this is the buety of the internet and blogs , we can discuss disagree and provide an counter idea. Creativity and new methods in anything from web or graphic design always come from somebody saying maybe this isnt right maybe there’s a better way. 🙂
Hi there could we possible correspond via email i would like to discuss more about your opinions and views on google analytics and online business in general, I realise you live in South Africa East London so a meeting would be very hard to arrange.
What are you views on the new trade policies that have to be applied from the EU. Do you think it will have any effect on how people work online and how traffic flows through websites ?
hi!,I like your writing so so much! Could we correspond more
about your article via AOL? I require an expert on this area to unravel my problem i am having with google analytics.
May be that’s you! Looking forward to hearing from you .