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Posted in Marketing | Posted by Impact Partnership
Posted on July 21, 2016
Reading Time: 5 minutesCongratulations! You now have an impressive website to point your clients and prospects to when they have questions about you and your services. Now the question is: do website visitors feel “at home” on your site, or do they come in the front door, see something they don’t like, and immediately leave? Google Analytics can help determine how many users are visiting your site, what they’re doing there, and where they came from. It’s comprehensive, responsive — and FREE!
Google Analytics is a platform for monitoring traffic and usage of your website. It allows you to view how many users access your site, how long they stayed, and what pages they viewed within a certain period of time. This provides valuable data for marketing and advertising strategies that better align your web presence for your business.
Better still, this data comes with unique insights from Google, meaning your results are pulled from the largest and furthest-reaching arbiter of web traffic. What you’ll see will be the closest to a complete picture of your site activity that can possibly be compiled.
You might be thinking: Impact Partnership, this is life-changing information. How do I get to this Google Analytics? How do I apply its wisdom to my business? Tell me, now! Please!
Settle down there, sport! We’ve got the step-by-step guide right here:
And then you’re in! Explore the suite of tools and monitors provided by Google Analytics and test out what works best for you.
You can also check this list to see if you’re already on a platform which already supports Google Analytics. If your platform is on that list, all you need to do is provide your Google ID tag. You should note, however, that, starting on July 1st, the standard Universal Analytics will stop processing data, and all functionality will be transferred to Google Analytics 4. (The specific differences are outlined here.) If you already have a UA property set up, you’ll need to migrate that over to GA4. You can check out the steps here to get started.
You’re all set up and ready to parse your just-measured data. But just what is it you’re measuring? The terms below are the most commonly used and what you should be most familiar with:
Your engagement rate shows the percentage of engaged sessions, or the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions over a specific time period, multiplied by 100. For example, if you had 1,000 engaged sessions and 10,000 total sessions, your engagement rate would be 10%.
Now, an engaged session is determined by a number of factors:
A good engagement rate varies by industry and business type, but on average, you’ll want to see a rate somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. We recommend looking at your reports to see which pages have the highest engagement rates. Through this, you’ll see which pages people are less engaged with and can consider making changes to those pages. For instance, if your contact page has a low engagement rate, then consider making small changes like shortening the contact form, adding social media links, or even restructuring the page to help boost those numbers.
The inverse of an engagement rate, a bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. If a client visited a page on your website and left without taking any action or triggering any events in less than 10 seconds, then that session would count toward your bounce rate.
In GA4, bounce rate is measured through the triggering of events, whereas UA’s bounce rate is measured based on page interactions. Instead of focusing on the Bounce Rate in 2023 and beyond, Google argues that Engagement Rate is a better performance indicator.
New users refers to the number of users who interacted with your site or launched your app for the first time. Ask simple questions, get simple answers.
Any action or engagement that happens on your website can be tracked and labelled as a conversion event. Google Analytics 4 considers the following to be Predefined Conversions:
Here are a few others you may run into while using GA4:
Tracking your form fills like those mentioned above are some of the most important events to track, as this is how clients will get in touch with you. Make sure you have notifications enabled any time someone fills out a form. If clients are filling out forms and you’re unaware and not following up, this means you’re losing out on potential business!
Traffic acquisition shows insights about where new sessions came from, regardless of whether the user is new or returning. Below are a few session default channel grouping metrics, categories by which particular traffic streams are defined:
Generally, tracking data over a 30-day period is sufficient. If you are running any sort of campaign via your website, you can adjust accordingly:
Generating reports on a consistent cadence is helpful in determining which months you’re seeing the most website traffic. Ask yourself: do the months with the most web traffic coincide with the most successful business months of the year? Did I see more traffic after hosting in person seminars or running ads on social media?
If you have further questions about applying Google Analytics to your business, or if you want to get further into the details about what GA can accomplish for you, Google provides an expansive forum for questions and processes. Take advantage of their ample resources and build your practice into a fast and intelligent business!
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