Using Google Analytics to Measure your Web Marketing: Part One

While many business owners and CEO’s know they need to measure the results of their marketing, many don’t measure beyond the sales generated.

Being aware of broader trends and areas of improvement help maximize the returns you’re getting from your web marketing and help you make better business decisions.

One way to measure your web marketing is leverage a free Google Analytics account to measure your website performance statistics.

Using Google Analytics to Measure your Web Marketing.

Part One- setting up your account.

If you don’t already have a google account, sign up for one and save your password in a safe place. Then, go to google.com/analytics and sign in.

Add in your website URL, country, Industry and fill out any other fields requested.

You’re almost done with your set-up, there’s one last critical step. Google Analytics will provide you with a tracking code which must be embedded in your website. Send this code to your web developer to add, and verify it’s working.

Then, schedule a reminder for yourself every 30 days to look at your stats, or ensure you’re getting a report from your web marketing team.

Part Two- getting familiar with your web visitor behaviour.

Once your account is created, click on your web address, and then on the left select Audience> Overview. You can choose your date range and even compare against past data using the tab on the top right.

Below is a screenshot comparing an overview of two months of web traffic. We’ll cover each metric and how to interpret it.

measuring web marketing

  1. A session is defined as the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website. Typically, you want to see this number increase each month.
  2. A user is a person who has had at least one session within the date range.
    Typically you want to see this number increase each month as well.
  3. Page views is the total number of pages viewed. This number should also increase each month.
  4. Pages per session shows the average pages per session- or, how engaged your web users are with your website. A great benchmark to aim for is 4-5 pages per session.
  5. Average session duration is how may minutes and seconds each session is. This is also an indicator of user engagement and this number should be increasing rather than decreasing.
  6. Bounce rate is the percentage of users that land on your site and exited without interacting with the page. This number should be decreasing rather than increasing.
  7. % of new sessions is an estimate of the percentage of first time visits. Typically this number should be increasing month over month.

By looking at this overview you can get a good idea of how engaged the traffic to your website is and measure your web marketing progress each month.

 

Next, we will find out specifically where your website traffic is coming from.

Click on Acquisition > Overview.

This chart shows the quantity and quality of the last two months of web site traffic. The blue lines are the most recent month, and the orange are the month previous.

measuring your web marketing -  user aquisition

  1. Organic Search Traffic is defined as users that come to your website from a search they’ve done on a search engine.
  2. Direct traffic is traffic that comes to your website by typing in your website address into the address bar.
  3. Social traffic is traffic that comes to your website through sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
  4. Referral traffic are website visitors that have come to your site from another website that links to yours.
  5. Email traffic are website visitors that have come to your website by clicking a link in email.

What this shows us is all traffic, from all sources, except email is up. The decrease in new sessions suggests more repeat traffic.

The behaviour of these users shows that the traffic from organic search has an increased bounce rate, which is bound to happen with the huge increase in traffic.

The culprit for the overall website increased bounce rate is the large jump in the bounce rate from our email traffic.  This tells us that perhaps we’re not doing the best job of engaging users from our last email newsletter.

In our next post we’ll cover how to determine what types of content is working, and what types of traffic are the best to cultivate.

What has been your experience with measuring your web marketing? Do you review your metrics regularly? Let us know in the comments below!

Don’t forget, sharing is caring, if you found this post useful please share!

 

 

Laurel Lindsay

Laurel Lindsay

President & Founder at The New Media Group
Laurel Stark nĂ©e Lindsay has helped thousands of businesses get better results from their online marketing since she began her career as a web marketer in 2003. As a speaker, author and CEO of The New Media Group, she’s been featured on CNN, Entrepreneur.com, CTV and ShawTV.
Laurel Lindsay
Laurel Lindsay
Laurel Lindsay