With all the website builders available these days, almost anyone can make a website look good.
But this doesn’t mean it will help your business grow.
Building and actually maintaining a website can be a considerable expense for businesses. But it is absolutely worth it.
We have seen the same crucial mistake made, many times.
Expensive websites being set up without Google Analytics – a fundamental oversight you really shouldn’t get when spending thousands of dollars.
Adventure Digital is all about empowering our clients with the knowledge they need to grow the business.
So let’s see how we can make your website work harder for you, by tracking relevant marketing metrics with Google Analytics.
Why Should I use Google Analytics for my website?
If you have a website, you also need to have a Google Analytics account connected to it. It provides you with valuable insight that helps you shape the success strategy for your business.
It is important for you to learn what is “working” on your website and what needs to be improved to help you increase your bottom line.
Not connecting Google Analytics to your website is the equivalent of working in the dark. You aren’t able to make accurate assessments and business decisions without the insight it provides.
Google Analytics collects a wide variety of data from people visiting your website. Invaluable data like how people are finding your website, when they visit, how long they stay, what pages they click through – and much more.
Below are some marketing metrics you should be tracking with Google Analytics.
TIP: Don’t forget to disclose the use of Google Analytics to collect data on your website. You can do this by adding a Google Analytics section to your privacy policy.
Know your audience – who’s visiting your website and how
Google Analytics will help you uncover important marketing metrics about your audience – and how they engage with your content.
With Google Analytics audience reports, you’ll will be able to find out:
- How old are the people visiting your website
- How many men vs women visit your website
- What are the interests of your audience
- Where are they located
- What devices were they using to access the website
This information is important because you will be able to establish if you are attracting your ideal customers. If not, you’ll have reason to make changes to your digital marketing strategy.
Analyse customer behaviour and your website engagement
Knowing how visitors are engaging with your website content will help you make important content marketing decisions.
Content engagement metrics show how your content strategy aligns with user interests.
Your customer engagement is directly related to overall profitability, as engaged users are more likely to convert into buying customers. They are also more likely to become repeat customers and share the product/service with other people.
Google Analytics user engagement metrics you can track include:
- How have visitors come to your site over a specified period of time?
- Are they new or returning visitors?
- Which pages are they landing on to come to your website?
- How many page views and sessions are they having?
- How much time are they spending on different pages?
- What’s the length of an average session on your website?
- What is your Bounce rate?
Understand why visitors are bouncing off your website
Another important marketing metric to track is your website bounce rate.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only visiting one page.
Your website may be getting a lot of traffic, but not necessarily conversions. This may mean that visitors to your website are not finding what they are looking for, thus resulting in high bounce rates.
You need to identify the reason behind it and work towards reducing the website bounce rate. Google analytics provides you with a detailed report of the pages experiencing a high bounce rate.
By drilling down and reviewing the pages in question, you may establish that your website is not optimised properly.
Or maybe it is not responsive to different devices and screen sizes. Or perhaps it is just not showing the content people have come to the website for.
Convert more of your visitors into paying clients
It is no secret that every business wants to convert more of their website visitors to paying clients.
It costs time and money to write relevant content, run online advertisements, post on social media, send out email newsletters and keep on top of your SEO strategy.
So it is important to be able to measure the results the activities across your digital ecosystem are generating. This allows you to evaluate what is working and what needs to be improved.
A high conversion rate tells you that your marketing efforts are effective and resulting in your website visitors completing the end goal. You can track your conversions by setting up Google Analytics goals.
Your goals will depend on your business and can be:
- Purchasing of your products or services
- Filling out a quote request form
- Downloading your app, ebook or any other lead magnet and getting people to your email list
- Contacting your business by submitting a form
- Engaging with your website in some way
Marketing metrics to measure your ROI
If you have been investing in paid advertising, Google Analytics will help you measure your return on investment (ROI).
The prerequisite for tracking ROI with Google Analytics is to set up ecommerce tracking and your goal conversions – actions that you want your customers to take on your website.
ROI is typically the most important measurement for advertisers because it shows the real effect that paid advertising has on your business.
While it’s helpful to know the number of clicks and impressions that you get – it’s even better to know how your ads are contributing to the success of your business.
Using Google Data Studio to visualise your data
When you first start using Google Analytics, it can feel a little overwhelming with the amount of data available to you. Our favourite way to display Google Analytics data in a meaningful, easy to understand way is by using Google Data Studio.
Google Data Studio is a free tool, developed by Google to help you with reporting and data visualisation. It can also pull data from other sources like Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Sheets and more. You can then combine your data into easy to read information and share reports by using widgets, graphs, charts and maps.
Our team uses Data Studio dashboards to analyse our marketing efforts and report performance to clients. To make things easy for you, we have put together a Google Data Studio template including all the metrics listed in this article. We believe it will become an invaluable tool for your business. All you need to do is connect it to your Google Analytics account to visualise information from your website.
Download the template and instructions on how to use it here.
Need help tracking your marketing metrics?
The benefits of tracking marketing metrics with Google Analytics are undeniable.
It’s one of the most important actions you can take to help you convert website traffic to paid customers.
It helps steer your digital marketing strategy and campaigns towards success – and rectify any failures while providing return on investment.
Deciding which metrics are relevant to you will depend on your business goals. The more relevant metrics you track, the better your understanding of what works and what doesn’t will be.
Adventure Digital has been delivering websites, marketing services, business intelligence dashboards and other digital solutions to businesses for over two decades.
If you aren’t sure what’s next when it comes to your digital marketing efforts – get in touch.
We can arrange a free 20 minute discovery session, to ascertain how we can get on the right track.
