Tag Archives: google analytics

Give me 2 minutes and you’ll be a master at measuring your web marketing – Part 2 of 3

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Analytics pt1

Build it and they will come….Said no-one ever about your website.


The more you know about your website visitors, the better you can serve them, and keep them coming back.

The most underutilized tool to help you improve your website’s performance is Google Analytics.

It’s a free tool that you can embed in your website to get a gold mine of information you can use to make better business decisions.

And in today’s video, we are going to focus on the audience section of Google Analytics and some of the reports available there and what they can do and what kind of intelligence they can provide you with.

This post will show you what metrics to look for to increase engagement and conversions from casual website browsers to actual sales.

I’ll also cover where to find important demographic and user details that might surprise you (I have website visitors from Kazakhstan? Cool! )

How is my website doing? A Snapshot of Your Audience Behavior.

The very first thing that they can provide you with is a snapshot of how your website’s doing.

So, click on Audience Overview and here it will tell you what your bounce rate is, your pages per session, and your time per session.

These are some metrics to focus on improving:

Bounce Rate.

Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.

Typically, it will hover up at least around 30% depending on your industry If it gets any higher than, let’s say 70, then you’re doing something that you want to change, because people are coming to your site and then they are leaving right away.

Pages Per Visit.

Pages per visit ideally should be at least 4.

So, again, you want people to come to your website and be engaged and find what they’re looking for and look at multiple pages.

Time on Site.

The same rule of thumb applies for Time on Site. More is better.

You want your website visitors to spend a lot of time on your website.

I always compare last month’s results to this month’s, so I can see if the results are turning upwards or downwards.

Who are my website visitors? Your Audience Demographics:

And then there’s a whole bunch of other information that’s just fantastic under the Audience section.

One is demographic information.smartphone marketing

This section is where you can see what is the approximate age and gender of the majority of people that visited your site.

You can also find out geographic information – what countries are people coming from and how engaged are they per country.

You can also find out what website browsers they’re using as well as mobile devices <—This is a great way to test your website and make sure that it’s used and performs properly in the browsers and on the devices that your customers or future customers are using.

Demographics

 

Just because you use Internet Explorer, for example, doesn’t mean that your website  visitors do. Make sure your website performs well on the browsers and devices your audience uses.  

Are my website visitors engaged? New versus Returning.

Under the Audience section again, you want to take a look at Behavior.

Under behaviour you will see the percentage of new visitors vs returning visitors.  You’ll also see how often people return to your site, and how long new vs returning visitors are spending on your site.

Hint- You want to have a healthy percentage of returning visitors to your website.

How could this information help you make better website marketing decisions?

Tell me in the comments below!

This post is the second in a series of 3 posts on how to master Google Analytics – complete with handy videos 🙂

Give me 2 minutes and you’ll be a master at measuring your web marketing (Part 1 of 3)

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If you’re wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your web marketing efforts, then look no further than Google Analytics!

Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to measure your website’s traffic & web marketing efforts.

If you have Google Analytics set up on your website , but aren’t using it, keep reading;  as a wise man once said:

“you can’t improve what you don’t measure”

In today’s Marketing Minute we’re going to cover how to use the reports found under the Acquisition section of Google Analytics. This is the first in a series of three articles on how to use the reports found in Google Analytics.

Are my web marketing results improving over time?

You’re likely spending a great deal of resources marketing your business online – when you add up the cost of your website and time spent on social media and email newsletters, it’s mind boggling to think that the vast majority of business owners do not measure their efforts for effectiveness.

Once you’re logged in, set the date range up on the top right hand side to compare your results to last month. This way you can get a good idea if your results are improving over time.

Date-Range-Analytics

Where is my website traffic coming from?

Once you’re signed in, on the left hand side click on Acquisition and then, Overview.

From there you’ll see a pie graph, which will show you the different sources of your website’s traffic:
website-traffic-top-channelsIdeally, this is going to be diversified, showing traffic from:

  1. ‘search’, which is search engines like Google,
  2. ‘direct’ – people typing in your website name directly,
  3. ‘referral’ – websites that are sending traffic to you,
  4. ‘social’ – your social media sites, and
  5. ‘e-mail’ – from your e-mail newsletter.

What websites are sending traffic to my website?

From Overview, then click on Referrals.

This is particularly useful if you have a domain name set-up for a particular campaign that is forwarded to your website or if you’re paying for any directory sites like bigyellowbookcompany.ca.

Here’s where you can see if you’re getting enough traffic to justify paying for any additional marketing efforts. You can see by how much traffic you’re getting as well as how engaged those people are that are coming from those particular websites.

How engaged are my website visitors?

Engagement can be measured by

  1. Session Duration shows the time that people are spending on your website when they come from that particular site
  2. Pages/Session shows the number pages that they’re looking at.
  3. Bounce Rate is also something to keep an eye on as well. That’s the amount of people that come to your website and leave right away. Ideally, this will be as low as possible.

traffic-sources

How effective is my social media at sending traffic to my website?

Once you’ve taken a look at that report, the next thing I want you to do is go to Social and then Landing pages. This is fantastic.

This report will show you what pages and how they’re performing as it relates to traffic from social media websites.

So if you’re writing a blog post a week, (like I recommend that you do), you can see what blog posts are performing well and which ones aren’t.

Again, you can look at

  1. how much time people are spending on your website on each of these specific pages
  2. and how many pages are they looking at after they land on that particular page.

how-much-timeAgain, if you’re promoting a particular page, say, using Google Adwords, or promoting a specific page by posting your blog posts to social networks, you can see what pages are working and which ones aren’t.

Don’t be afraid to change & tweak your website pages & their headlines to increase your engagement and your performance of your website.

If you found this valuable, please share and/or comment. Thank you so much for watching!

5 Tips To Save Time On Your Web Marketing

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If you are a business owner and you’re strapped for time but you know you still need to be web marketing, keep reading.

Web MarketingWe are going to cover 5 ways that you can increase your effectiveness and decrease the time you spend web marketing yourself.

Tip #1 Be Strategic

You don’t necessarily need to be engaging in all the web marketing activities out there.
What you do need to be doing is engaging the ones that are most effective. Historically, the most effective web marketing tactics are

  1. Email Marketing
  2. Video Marketing
  3. Blogging

So just focus on what works and what will attract your target audience to your website or to your web property. Work smart, not hard and save yourself some time.

Tip #2 Multi-task

Your smart phone has the power of a large computer so why not use it?
When you’re on the road, stuck in traffic, you can actually get your phone to type your blog posts for you. Use the voice mode tool and get those audio files transcribed or you can write an email to yourself and with the microphone icon, when you speak it will actually transcribe and write those blog posts for you. Talk about a handy tip.

See above- the microphone icon on the bottom left will type as you speak - (iphone 6s)

See above- the microphone icon on the bottom left will type as you speak – (iphone 6s)

Tip #3 Automate Where Possible

Take advantage of automating tools especially when it comes to social media.
One of my favorite tools is Buffer for a couple of reasons. It helps me by suggesting content that I can then post to my network. As well it lets me schedule my post in advance. So it helps me both curate content and plan my posts in advance.

Tip #4 Delegate

And don’t be afraid to delegate. You don’t necessarily need to be doing all of your web marketing activities yourself. If you take a little bit of time and create a to-do-list with detailed instructions, you can then delegate that to an assistant, a part-time worker, an admin assistant or a an agency that specializes in offering done-for-you marketing management . Investing the time up front will allow your future self to have a little more time to do what you’re best at.

Tip #5 Repurpose Your Content

Make your content work hard! If you’re creating videos or blog posts, you can literally repurpose one piece of content into up to 10 pieces. That translates to more content for less effort, more clicks to your website and more sharing on social media.

How do I repurpose my content?
Summarize a blog post into a video or transcribe a video into a blog post.
Save your video as an audio file and upload as a podcast. Create an image with a quote or an infographic highlighting key points of your blogpost . And you can repurpose that content and get a lot more bang from your bucket than just using at once.

That’s your One Minute Tip. If you found this valuable, please consider sharing with your network and don’t ever miss a tip if you subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thanks so much for watching.

Optimize your Marketing Strategy with this Free Web Tool

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marketing strategyAlthough the entry barrier to online businesses such as e-commerce is lower than for their offline equivalents, making a success of your enterprise is far from guaranteed.

Fortunately, there are countless web tools that you can use to help you get your business where you want it to be. Not all of these tools come cheap though, which can be off-putting for a fledgling project unsure of how much they can afford to spend on something that might prove unnecessary.

Thanks to the people behind our favourite search engine however, one of the most powerful tools available to help you optimize your marketing strategy is completely free.

Google Analytics is available to everyone, easy to set up, and gives you insights into where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing once they arrive, helping you to study the following data and make the tweaks that will improve your conversion rates.

Preferable referrals

Google Analytics allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, including those being sent there by way of referrals. This category tells you which websites are directing traffic back to your website, how much they are sending, and what it’s doing when it’s there.

If you’re paying for any online advertising as part of your marketing strategy, perhaps from the big yellow book company or other directory sites, this data can help you decide if this is money well spent or not.

If after analyzing your referral traffic you feel the amount is too low, or that the bounce rate is too high, you may want to consider dropping some of the referral services you are currently not getting value for money from and concentrating on the ones that you are.

Social engagements

Getting the most out of social media is a key part of any good marketing strategy, and Google Analytics can help you see how well your own efforts are faring.

By looking at the statistics in the Social tab, you will find exactly which of the various platforms you’re posting on are performing well, and which aren’t.

Are you getting more traffic from Twitter than from Facebook? Does your traffic from Instagram stick around longer than those who came from Pinterest? Do those coming from Google+ or LinkedIn look at more pages? Who makes the most comments? Who bounces?

And now that you know, what are you going to do with the information? Will you concentrate more on those who already perform well, or try to bring the others up to speed too?

The choice is yours, but at least now you have the data to help you decide.

Content with your content?

If you’re regularly paying for or writing your own blog posts, producing videos, creating infographics, or any other type of content as part of your marketing strategy, it needs to be hitting its intended mark if you’re to be successful.

Another way of using Google Analytics to help optimize your marketing strategy is to learn what type of content really resonates with your visitors and what leaves them unimpressed.

By measuring what content people like, by noting how long they’re spending on the different types and how often people bounce from them, you can get an idea of what topics people are interested in, whether videos are adding value to your marketing strategy, or if the time spent creating infographics is worth it.

As a free tool, Google Analytics provides priceless insights into the behaviour of your web traffic, helping you to optimize your marketing strategy by understanding where your audience is coming from, how effective your social media is, and what type of content you should concentrate on going forward.

To learn more about Google Analytics, watch our Youtube channel here:

How Using Google Analytics Will Help You Make Smarter Business Decisions

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Did you know there is a free Google website tracking tool?

3 things Google Analytics tells you about your website trafficHere is how Google Analytics can help you achieve your business objectives.

Google Analytics is a free website traffic analytics program which provides an enormous amount of data on your website traffic and user behaviour.

In fact, it’s likely you’re sitting on a gold mine of information.

There is an entire industry dedicated to customer, consumer and market research.

It’s widely believed that the more you know about your customer and their preferences, the more successful you will be.

10 things Google Analytics can tell you about your website traffic:

Google analytics, when properly added to your website can tell you at least 10 things you didn’t know about your future customers.

1. How long people spend on your website

2. What website they were at before, that sent them to your website

3. What keywords they typed into Google or other search engines to get to your website

4. What pages they spend time on and which ones they leave right away

5. What web sites send the traffic that generate the best leads for you.

7. If this is their first time on your site or if they’re returning visitors

8. What device they are using on your site ie: Smartphone versus Laptop etc.

9. Where most of your visitors are geographically located

10. What age & gender your website visitors are.

This information is of little use on it’s own, but with a little analysis you can use these analytics to help you make smarter, more profitable business decisions.

If you knew this information for certain, you could then make fully informed marketing decisions like:

1. What marketing initiatives are deserving of their high budget.

You can tell what website are sending you high quality web traffic that consists of users that stay interested and spend time on your website, and even contact you.

You’ll also be able to tell what websites are either not sending you enough traffic, or the ones that send low quality traffic that leaves right away.

2.  What marketing initiatives should be cut

If your email newsletter sends high quality traffic to your website, but that ad on the radio station isn’t, then it makes sense to cut the radio ad.

This way you can use google analytics to make informed marketing decisions, instead of just guessing what is working and what isn’t.

3. What markets have high demand and little competition- and are ripe for the plucking.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve logged into my Google Analytics and been surprised at some small niche that has a high demand, that I am under servicing.

By quickly reacting to the information displayed in Google Analytics, I can quickly provide that market segment with enough information to make a purchasing decision. In this way I use Google Analytics to drive more profits in my business.

4. What content to create.

If you’re blogging, posting to social media properties or creating any kind of educational or marketing type materials you can use the information from your website statistics to determine what people would like to know more about.

Long tail keyword searches like “google website tracking” often show up in my Google Analytics and help me understand exactly what questions my future customers have.

If I can address these questions properly I have a chance to earn their business.

How will you use analytics in your business? Please comment below.

And, if you found this article valuable, please consider sharing it with your network.