Google Analytics is a great platform where businesses can track and see exactly how the customers are engaging with their products or services. The best part of Google Analytics is that it is completely free to use. Any site owner can use the analytics software offered by Google in order to track visits and conversions happening on their website.
However, there are several advanced features available in GA, which are seldom used by the site owners or digital marketers. These features, if utilized properly, can reveal some useful data. In this post, I will discuss 3 ways through which business owners can reveal valuable data which remains hidden otherwise. This data can be used for improving the customer behavior thereby increasing conversions and generating maximum returns on investment.
#1. Identify Customer Interests and Track Conversions
Many webmasters make the mistake of tracking the number of visitors without exactly identifying the sole purpose of the visitors. The very first thing every webmaster must engage into, is to find out the real purpose of the site visitors. This will give an appropriate idea about the interests of the people and will allow you to take more customer centric decisions.
In order to make any analytics report accurately judge the performance of your overall site, enabling conversions is important. Follow the steps given below in order to enable the tracking of conversions on your website:
- Let Google track conversions for at least a week. Then under the “Conversion” tab, click on “Overview”.This will display the number of times your set goal was achieved and also display the source which was responsible for the completion of the goal.
If you feel, you are not getting the desired results then it could be because the people who are visiting your site are not interested in your goal or the sources that are sending in traffic are not so genuine or related. Hence, you may move ahead and find out the actual customer interests.
Here is how you will identify the customer interests:
- Log in to your analytics account and move to the “All Pages” tab located under the “Site Content” column in the “Behavior” menu. You will find the top performing pages of your site along with the bounce rate and page value metrics.
Note down the top pages along with their page value which is a metric calculated by adding transaction revenue plus total goal value and dividing it by total page views. Now, think whether are you getting the desired traffic on the pages that are having the maximum converting value. If not then you must replan your conversion strategy.- Move to the “Exit Pages” column present under the “Behavior” tab and identify the top exit pages of your site. Exit is a metric which mentions the number of times the visitors exited from that page. If the top exit page is other than the goal pages of your site then the campaign is not going to produce the desired results.
- Move to the “Site Search” column present under the “Behavior” tab and click on “Overview”. This will display the terms which the users put into the search box present in your site. This data is immensely useful as it can tell you exactly what the user is looking for in your site. A proper analysis of the site search data can help you to take better marketing decisions leading to more conversions and increased Return on Investment (ROI).
- On the “Audience” tab, click on “Overview” located under “Interests”. Here, Google displays three categories namely, affinity, in-market and other categories. You can determine the type of visitors coming to your site based on their areas of interest. Affinity categorizes audiences on a broader scale, in-market specifies audiences on a product specific scale while other specifies audiences on the type of content they consume. These metrics are hugely helpful in determining the interests of people visiting the site.
#2. Find out the Exact Number of Unique Visitors Coming From Your Targeted Business Location
Location targeted is extremely important for any business to succeed. Google Analytics by default shows the total unique visitor data. If if you move to the country/territory column located under “Demographics”, it displays the total number of visits from that location and not the unique visitors. Unique visitors is an extremely vital metric that allows you to track the number of unique individuals who visited your site. Hence, in order to determine the total number of unique visitors coming from any location, follow the steps provided below:
- Click on the all visits link located at the top of the dashboard. You will see a “segmentation” dashboard opens up.
- Click on “create new segment” then specify the location and click save. Thereafter, include that segment in the GA dashboard in order to view the exact number of unique visitor coming from that location which is highly relevant from your business point of view.
Segmented data is not only helpful in tracking location related data but is also helpful in refining data as per demographics, technology, behavior or any of your custom defined conditions.
#3. Analyze Data by Way of Content Grouping
For every business owners, some products are of a high value than others. Wouldn’t it be great to categorize all the products on the basis of content they offer and analyze them specifically. This helps the business owner to take refined decisions which affects the conversion rate of all the products present in that particular category.
In order to enable content grouping on your site, follow the steps given below
– Log in to your analytics account and click on admin.
– Now click on content grouping and use any one of the given 3 methods to create content groups:
- Tracking Code
- Page Extraction
- Create a Rule Set
More help regarding how you can implement these on your site can be found on this Google Analytics Help.
After you have grouped your content, you can easily analyze which sections of your site is receiving the maximum traffic or bounce rate. This way you can plan a proper strategy for targeting your audience as per the product groups and categories.
Google Analytics has much more to offer than people can actually realize. All you need is a habit of playing with data and finding out the best for your company.
Images: ”Businessman Analyzing Financial Chart / Shutterstock.com“
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