14 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website
An attractive, optimised, and generally in top shape website is the essential basis of any marketing strategy. Driving traffic to your website ensures that you’re in control of the process and that you can direct users through the conversion funnel.
In order to have an optimized website, having the right information is essential. Luckily, thanks to Google Analytics, it’s now possible to know everything you’ve ever wanted to know about your website visitors… and even something else that you would never have thought to ask. But with so much information, you run the risk that the trees won’t let you see the forest. That’s why today I’m going to tell you 14 ways to use Analytics to improve your website, according to experts from the Forbes Agency Council.
1) Keep an eye on your bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important pieces of data to optimize your website. If a large number of your visitors leave the site after visiting just one page, you know you have a problem. But the solution is entirely within your reach: you just have to thoroughly review this page and improve it with more effective calls to action or more engaging content. Have you tried video marketing yet?
2) Analyze new potential markets
One use of Google Analytics that you may not have noticed is to discover new potential markets for your products and services.
If your company operates globally or you are considering internationalization, you can analyze separately the number of visitors and conversion rates of different countries to see where it is convenient for you to focus your efforts.
3) Identify your best content
If you’re a content marketer, you know how much it costs to find content that resonates with users. That’s why, when you’ve achieved it, you want to be clear about what worked so you can repeat it. And thanks to Analytics, it’s easy: just look for the pages with the most traffic, conversions, and results.
4) Use the right attribution model
The attribution model is a piece of information that can be easily overlooked, but it’s important to have more information about the most effective channels to convert.
By default, the attribution model in Google Analytics is “last interaction”. If you want to use it to improve your website, try changing it to “first interaction” and use it to better understand how each of the channels contributes to conversions.
5) Study the flow of behavior
The Behavior Flow Report is a gem to better understand the path that visitors follow on your website. Instead of giving you simple numerical statistics, this report allows you to see graphs about the path visitors take on your website. This way, you can easily see which pages they interacted with or which was the last one they visited before leaving the website.
6) Examine trends
The different Google Analytics metrics are dependent on each other. Sometimes, a viral infographic can increase your bounce rate, or putting you in the top rankings for a competitive keyword can lower the number of pages per session. That’s why, instead of looking at a specific piece of data and a specific moment, you need to have a global view of trends over time.
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“The behavior flow report is a gem to better understand the path that visitors follow on your website”
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7) Discover the best traffic sources
Basic, but essential: you need to know if organic or paid traffic is the most important for your website, and which are the most profitable sources within each of them. This way, you can optimize your investment in the sites and ads that work.
8) Study user flow
Along with the behavior flow, the user flow report is another essential metric to improve your website. Thanks to it, you will be able to understand the behavior of users, their interaction with the website, what they like and what they don’t. Only then can you make informed changes to achieve the best results.
9) Take advantage of attention-grabbing pages
If you study the time on the page on your website, you can easily identify the pages that attract the most attention from users. To take advantage of this information, you need to optimize these pages for conversions. In short, it is a simple way to increase your ROI.
10) Prioritize mobile
Google Analytics lets you know how much traffic to your website is coming from desktop and mobile devices. And given the growing priority of mobile traffic, optimizing for mobile devices is one of the best ways to improve your website. If mobile traffic has a high bounce rate, it’s time to make your website more responsive and improve load times.
11) Check out multi-channel attribution
By having aggregated data, Analytics allows us to gain a deep understanding of which channels are influencing our results. With tools like Analytics360, you can now know which channels the customer journey starts with and position yourself to engage them from the start.
12) Identify the star keywords
What terms are users searching for when they find you? And what would you like them to be? If you can align the answer to these two questions, you’ll have a lot to gain from optimizing your website.
13) Turn on Google Search Console
To get a deep understanding of your organic traffic, you need to turn to Google Search Console. Many webmasters skip this step due to ignorance or laziness, but don’t fall for this mistake! Here you can find a lot of data to analyze, such as the performance of different keywords and the results that users see in their search before they decide to click through to your site.
14) Don’t look at a single thing
Finally, the star tip for improving your website is that there are no magic metrics. If you focus on a single piece of data, you’ll lose your overall perspective, so take the time to analyze how your entire website ecosystem is performing.
