Tracking Site Visitors: What Analytics Can Tell You
How do you know if your website is attracting and keeping potential customers? How do you measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts? It is critical to regularly review the analytics that provide information about how much traffic your site is receiving, how customers behave once they’re on your site, how quickly they leave (or bounce from) your site and other important information that will help you improve and fine tune both your site and your marketing strategies.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics programs, and is free for websites that generate 10 million or fewer hits per month. With an easy-to-use interface, several customizable reporting features and a robust set of performance metrics, Google Analytics provides valuable insight about the effectiveness of your website.
With Google Analytics, you can view:
Content Analytics: Discover which parts of your site are performing well, which pages are most popular and which might need some improvement.
Social Analytics: Find out how successful your social media programs are and see how users interact with the sharing features on your site. You can also see how visitors engage with your content across social platforms.
Conversion Analytics: Discover how many customers your site is receiving, how much you’re selling and how visitors are engaging with your website.
Mobile Analytics: See how your mobile marketing efforts are impacting your business and view the performance of your mobile apps.
Advertising Analytics: If you use paid search (Google AdWords), you can find out how well your mobile, social and search and display ads are working.
You can easily customize your metrics to view:
- Visits
- % New Visits
- Avg. Visit Duration
- Bounce Rate
- Pages/Visit
- Pageviews
- Unique Visitors
You can compare any two of the above metrics, and can select to view the data by specific date ranges, or by pre-defined time frames (hourly, day, week, or month). Google Analytics also provides information about your visitors’: demographics (language, country/territory and city); system (browser, operating system and service provider); and mobile information (operating system, service provider and screen resolution) if they used their phone to find you.
The options are endless with this amazing, free tool from the undisputed king of search. Need help navigating Google Analytics for the first time? Read the Google Analytics Set Up Checklist and begin improving your website and online marketing efforts today.
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