There’s a huge amount of information in Google Analytics and it can be confusing when you first log on to your account as to what you should actually be looking at. It’s difficult to explain it all in a blog post, but hopefully this will give you a starting point.

When you first log into your Google Analytics account, after clicking on ‘view reports’ you’re taken to a dashboard, which is basically an overview of the last month to date. The information displayed is an overview of visits to the website (and whether they’ve gone up or down), page views, bounce rate etc.

image shows analytics dashboard for Forty First

From there, you need to drill more deeply into the important stats. I’m not going to be covering ‘goals’ which you may have set up if you track forms or e-commerce activity, more the basics. The stats you’re mostly going to be interested in are where your visitors have come from (so which aspects of your marketing are attracting visitors to your site), and what those visitors are looking at (e.g pages). You may be interested in other data such as which countries visitors are from, and even technical data such as which browser they use, although this isn’t as important (in my mind) as other information.

The next stats to look at are traffic sources. This gives an overall idea of where your visitors are coming from and what keywords they used in a search to find your site. The image below shows all traffic sources, although you can split out traffic into search engines and referring sites (sites which may have links pointing to your site). You can look at each referring site to see how many visitors they sent, how long they spent on the site, and what the bounce rate is from those sources.

All traffic sources report

If you look at the keywords report you can see which keywords your site is being found for (often it’s the company name which is the most popular keyword), hopefully followed by keywords relating to your products or services. However if you have an information based site (such as business service) and blog a lot, you can find your site ranks for some rather obscure keywords too! If you sell products, the keywords listed should be targeted towards what you sell.

keyword report

The next set of information to view is the content overview. This gives an idea of which pages people are looking at on your site. You can go very in depth here with paths through your site and ‘in page analytics’ which shows which links on your pages people are clicking on. You should look at top content, work out if any pages are missing from this list which you expect to be there, and also if any pages have a high bounce rate, perhaps they’re not targeted enough in a search.

content overview

top content

This really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Google Analytics, but for those of you who are new to all of this, hopefully a point in the right direction! For more on Google Analytics and measuring web marketing, take a look at our new Online Marketing Tracking & Measurement Guide.

Which stats have you found to be useful and have you adjusted your online marketing based on what your visitor stats are telling you?

These are some of the features I really like:

Site overlay – this shows you which clicks are clicked on the most from your home page. Really useful to see which links visitors prefer or perhaps if image navigation is more popular than regular text navigation, especially useful for e-commerce sites!

Top content – find out which pages on your site are the most popular and by digging a bit deeper, find out which pages may have high bounce rates or high entry rates. Great to find out which pages are performing well and which ones not so much.

Comparison reports – by comparing one month from another, not only can you find out traffic levels but where increases have come from, or perhaps what may have led to decreases in traffic.

All traffic sources – find out which aspects of your online marketing are driving the most traffic to your website.

Keywords – which keywords are people using to find your site? Is your search engine optimisation performing well? Perhaps visitors aren’t finding your site for the right keywords at all!

Goals and funnels – track how many visitors are completing goals on your site such as buying a product or registering their interest. You can also find out where shoppers may be dropping away in the transaction process.

Filters – Enter your computer’s IP address so that it doesn’t record all your visits or your staff visits!

Analytics is a bit of a minefield, but fear no more. Our next free teleseminar, ‘What Do My Google Analytics Mean?’ is all about understanding the information given in Google Analytics and what this means for your website.

So, STOP wondering if you need a new web design and START finding out what’s happening on your website right now. Don’t miss out as we share vital tips with you. Find out more and register here!

But what does it actually mean?

Bounce rate is the percentage of one page visits to a site, when a visitor arrives and then literally ‘bounces away’, I.e probably clicks on the back button to go back to where they came from. The visitor will view the page and will not stay on the site to browse around. The bounce rate can help determine how effective a website’s content is, measuring whether visitors browse more deeply into a site. Generally, the lower the percentage, the better.

However, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds and the actual percentage will vary depending on what kind of site you have.

Avinash Kaushik, a Google Analytics specialist, has stated  “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis.”

This percentage needs to considered in relation to the objectives of your website. For example, for an online shop, the bounce rate is a very useful measurement of the effectiveness of the site and the marketing around it, e.g SEO, pay per click, social media marketing. Information sites which drive potential customers to contact them via email or phone may see much higher bounce rates. Blog sites are the same as often visitors will read a post and then surf away again. Visitors to Savvy Marketers often read our latest posts and then leave the site without looking further. Our bounce rate is therefore quite high. Typically information sites (such as B2B services) have higher bounce rates than e-commerce sites.

E-commerce sites I work with often have much lower bounce rates than the information/ service sites I work with and if they were over 35%, I would be worried! That would mean that their online marketing isn’t working and the pages themselves aren’t compelling to visitors. One of my client’s bounce rate averages at around 25% for her e-commerce site.

It’s well worth keeping an eye on your bounce rate stats and if the figure is high, working out which pages may be causing the high bounce rates and reviewing the content on them or perhaps their optimisation.

We’d love to know any tips you have for lowering your bounce rates, or if you have any questions on your web stats.

The short answer is you don’t know – until you try it!  In our experience, owners of small businesses are discovering all kinds of benefits from using social media marketing methods – and many different ways of using the social networks too.  It isn’t just about immediately getting more sales!

However, it would be foolish to keep using precious time and resources on activities that aren’t working and measuring results and effectiveness are a vital part of marketing.  Here are a few ways you can start measuring social media effectiveness:

Website visitors – You don’t only want to measure the number of visitors to your site with a tool like Google Analytics, you need to capture their details to be able to contact them again.  This is where having a sign-up box will help.

E-Commerce – It’s surprising the number of potential customers who don’t complete the purchase, even though they fully intended to buy.  Most Shopping Carts will let you know where and how many people jump ship, so you can correct and reduce the loss.

Blog – Providing interesting content will encourage readers to comment.  Also, make it easy for people to subscribe to the feed and offer more than one way for them to do this (either to a reader or by email).

Article Marketing – monthly reports will show you how many views each article got, the number of clicks on each link, and even which keywords people used to find the article!

Newsletters – Using a good provider (not Outlook!)  will enable you to see how many people received your mailing, how many opened it (although this isn’t completely accurate as some people have a preview window which automatically opens the message) and most importantly, the number of clicks back to your selected web pages.

Social Networks – Of course you want to know which networks are bringing the most visitors to your website or blog.  Using (currently) free tools like http://bit.ly/ and http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url (part of the Hootsuite Twitter client) mean you can easily track this.

I hope this has given you some ideas to try out in your social media marketing.  What else have you tried that can be measured and works well?  We’d love you to share by leaving your comments below!

One question I always ask prospects and clients is whether they’ve got website tracking in place, i.e stats which tell them who’s visiting their website, where they came from and what they’re doing on their site. More often than not the stats are there, but how often they look at them, or whether they understand them is a different matter.

However, did you know that your website’s stats can also tell you all about the sales and enquiries on your website? If you didn’t know then this is something you need to be looking at. Knowing who converts on your website and where they came from is highly important in understanding which parts of your marketing are working best, whether it’s from an online or an offline source.

If you use Google Analytics for your website stats, then you should be setting up ‘goals’.  You can define a goal yourself, so for example, when a form is completed it will record it, or when a purchase has been made. If you’re not sure how to set up the goal, then you can ask your web developer, or if they don’t know, yours truly!

Once your goals are set up, then you’ll have that vital information as to how the visitor found you that led to the lead or sale. So for example, you can find out which keywords were typed in to a search that led to the conversion, perhaps a link from another site led to the conversion, or the visitor may have come direct, so they already know about your website. You can also see visitors who clicked through from a newsletter that led to a conversion. There’s a wealth of information that you need to know to work out where your money is best spent. Did that expensive advertising or paid link lead to any sales?

The more information you arm yourself with about your site, the more effective your marketing will be, and we all need this in the current economic climate! 

So, what can you do about setting up website tracking and understand what all the stats mean?

Firstly, find out if your web hosting company provides visitor tracking with your account. Most web hosting companies do provide stats although the quality of these stats can vary enormously from almost useless information, such as Webalizer to AW Stats, which is quite good. If your web host’s visitor tracking is poor or non-existent, you do have alternatives ranging from free to cheap to quite expensive!

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog post, you’re a small business, so I won’t cover the paid options. So here are a couple of good free options:

1.    Google Analytics
Google’s free website tracking provides a huge amount of useful information so that you can really determine which aspects of your online marketing are working the best. There are a lot of stats provided which can be a bit daunting at first, but once you have a basic understanding, you’ll find it very useful. One option to make the most of is ‘goals’ which allows you to track either sales or online forms on your website and find out exactly where those who bought or enquired came from – really important information! Setting it up will either involve you adding a script to your web pages, or you can ask a techie to do it for you.

2.    Statcounter
Statcounter is another free web tracking software service, and although doesn’t provide as in depth information as Google Analytics, is not bad nonetheless. If you’re after a basic alternative to the rather poor Webalizer, or you have no tracking at all, then this will give you the information about your visitors that you need. Setting up Statcounter is similar to Google Analytics, you can either add the code onto the pages yourself, or ask a techie to do it for you.

You can run either of the above alongside your web hosting stats if you want as well, although you may find the stats aren't quite the same as different web stats packages seem to measure traffic in different ways (just to add to confusion!).

As for understanding what all the stats mean, I’ll cover it in a future blog post!