Understanding Key Insights with Google Analytics

What are some of the questions that Google Analytics can specifically answer? How many visitors does my website receive? The analytics on website traffic include the total number of visitors, new versus returning visitors, and trends over time. So think about that. You know, if the total number of visitors is important, how many people are coming, but that's obviously important.

You want to drive visitors to your website so they can do valuable actions once they're there. But you also want to know, well, how many of these folks have come before versus are coming for the first time. And that can help you get a sense of the stickiness of your website.

Also, how many repeat purchases and orders are you generating? Where do my website visitors come from? Extremely important, particularly if you're running several different campaigns on different platforms, meta campaigns, Google ads, and email campaigns. You'll be able to determine where that is coming from.

And we're going to look at reports, which break out search when someone's doing organic search versus direct, when someone's simply typing in your website name into the browser. Referral, when that traffic is coming from another website, like your social media or a blog. And social media, of course, is also broken out separately to see which of your social media channels is driving that traffic.

Email campaigns and paid ads, which also include paid search and any other paid ads you're doing on social media or any type of digital paid ad. What are the demographics of my website visitors? In order to effectively market to your targeted audience, you need to understand, well, who they are. And this is one of the sources of data that can help you clarify who your customers are. It'll provide insights into the demographics of your visitors, including age, gender, location, language, as well as the interests of your visitors, which tells you that these visitors are also interested in these subject matters because Google will track your visitors' activity across any website that they browse on a Google platform.

Which pages on my website are the most popular? Google Analytics tracks page views and engagement metrics for each page on your website. We'll talk about tracking codes as long as there's a Google tag on that page; you will be able to track the engagement and activity on that page. What actions do visitors take on your website? You can track user interactions such as clicks, you know, what are they clicking on, form submissions, downloads or downloading a white paper or some other document, video views, the videos that you host on your website, well, how many, you know, how many views are these videos getting and other events that you identify as a conversion event.

And we're going to go into that in detail. What is the bounce rate of your website? All right, so the bounce rate is when someone comes to your website and, within a specified period of time, at least nine seconds, they don't do any action such as go to another page, click a button, or fill out a form, and they just leave. Well, that is considered a bounce, and you want to minimize your bounce rate because a small bounce rate means that there's more engagement taking place.

So you can see the percentage of single-page sessions where visitors leave without interacting further, that's the bounce rate, and you want low bounce rates, right, and you can track that. Which marketing channels drive the most traffic and conversions, right? So you might have several different marketing campaigns going on, and you could track not just the traffic but the conversion data. So, when coming from a Facebook ad versus a Google ad, how likely is one of these visitors versus the other, you know, coming from another source, how likely are they to convert? What is the conversion rate of your website? Google Analytics can calculate conversion rates for specific goals or actions.

You might have an e-commerce website, and you're tracking conversions. At the same time, you can also track people who may have signed up for a newsletter, which is also a valuable action that you want your visitors to take. How does web performance vary over time, right? So, a historical perspective and being able to look at and analyze trends are also very important in terms of learning, gaining insight that can lead to informed decisions.

So you can track changes in website performance over time and identify seasonality, trends, and patterns. Okay, so let's briefly discuss the buyer's journey. Buyer's journey refers to the process that a customer or a prospect goes through before they become a customer, right? So the very first stage is awareness.

Before someone can purchase from you, visit your website, they need to be aware of you. And the awareness stage is considered a top-of-funnel metric. If you look at the sales process as a funnel, wider at the top and narrower as you go down, the top being awareness, the very bottom of the funnel would be purchase.

So a lot of visitors may come to your website, and a certain percentage of them will hopefully turn into customers. So you can analyze top-of-funnel metrics such as website traffic and traffic sources to understand which channels are driving awareness. You can see first-time visits, and where those first-time visits are coming from, organic search, or is it a campaign that you might be doing on Metta or on TikTok, you'll be able to understand, okay, these campaigns are driving awareness.

So once someone's aware of you or of your brand, before they purchase, they might go through a period of consideration, right, where they are comparing your brand, your product, your service to competitive offers. And during this time, you know, depending upon the type of purchase, it is obviously higher ticket purchases, purchases with greater risk, whether it's financial risk, social risk, that would generally, those types of purchases, decisions generally require or involve a longer period of consideration. So you can track behavior metrics such as page views, session duration, bounce rate, and navigation paths to understand more about how people or visitors are interacting with your website during the consideration phase.

The more pages that they're viewing, well, the more consideration is taking place. The longer they're staying on your website, again, that's positive, more consideration. The lower the bounce rate, the more likely it is that they're getting to your website and you're providing information that's useful enough for them to decide to stay and read and watch, and some interact with your website content.

Now that they're finally aware of you, they've done some consideration. Well, now you reach the conversion stage, the purchase stage, right? You could track conversion events such as purchases. It's not always going to be a purchase. Sometimes you're tracking sign-ups or downloads, and you can gain insights into the conversion rates and paths.

You can actually create funnels in your reporting, customize sales funnels, and see how the customers journey on your website from page to page to ultimately purchase and see if there are any bottlenecks or any areas where they're dropping off and identify and flag those areas and figure out how to fix it to ensure more people who start the journey of purchase ultimately or conversion ultimately convert. But the customer journey doesn't end at the first purchase or initial purchase, right? You want to retain these customers. You want them to purchase more.

You want them to resubscribe when their subscription ends. And you also want to turn them into advocates, right? You want them to tell others, hey, you know, you need to try this brand. So you can track user behavior beyond initial conversions, such as repeat visits, engagement with loyalty programs, and maybe you have pages on your website or a page that addresses your loyalty program for customers, and how many of your customers are engaging with that.

That's going to likely reduce churn of customers if they are, you know, engaged in loyalty programs and rewards. And you can also use your website to encourage referrals from existing customers, right? You have friends and family referral programs, and you can track all of that activity with Google Analytics. So in the next section, we will be discussing how to develop a Google Analytics strategy.