Simple Analysis Starting Points Using Google Analytics
Site Search
If you have a search facility on your website, you should setup “Site Search”. Site search will allow you to view the search terms that visitors are entering into your search facility.
Some Site Search outcomes you may wish to check:
- Are there any relatively high-volume search phrases that bounce? I.e. Visitors use your search facility, enter a particular search phrase and thereafter immediately leave your website, perhaps due to irrelevant results?
(This metric is called % Exit) These high volume search terms will require better search results, to improve the user experience and retain the visitor.
- You may want to promote high volume search terms, especially in the case where these search terms result in revenue – which Google Analytics also measures.
- Do visits to your website that include the search functionality have a higher conversion rate? If so, this could mean that your search facility is working well and you may want to lead more visitors down this path.
- What Percentage of visitors utilise the search facility on your website? There is no clear “right” or “wrong” here, but if you are making changes to your navigation or website structure, this is certainly a metric you would like to check, especially in the case where visits that include site search, yield a better conversion rate.
Revenue & Transactions
- Which marketing channels do most of your high value transactions come from? Transactions with a high sales value might originate from a particular campaign. By promoting these campaigns further you will increase the likelihood of receiving more high value transactions. You will also be able to segment the products that provide the biggest net profit and thereafter, look to see which campaigns contributed to these product sales.
- Other obvious metrics include Revenue and Conversion Rate per Marketing Channel (Paid Search, Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic and Email Marketing)
Where do visitors exit your site?
- “% Exit” is the metric that you need to observe to find this information. “% Exit” will indicate the percentage of site exits that occurred from a particular page, or set of pages. If there is a high % exit on your Store Locator page, this is understandable, as the visitors may have “found” what they are looking for – your physical location. If there are pages that have an “odd” high % Exit, these pages may need to be optimised. Of course, visitors have to end their session sometime and eventually leave your website, so interpreting this metric in context is very important.
Top Landing Page Bounce Rate
- Your Top Landing pages (the first page a visitor sees) and Bounce Rate (Single page visits) are a great combination. Usually only a few pages make up the bulk (> 50%) of top landing pages. Monitoring their bounce rate is important. Also, these pages could be considered ‘low hanging fruit’, as improving their efficiency would have a positive effect on the bulk of visitors.
Segmenting your data
Segmenting your data is very important and helps you understand how different “types” of visitors interact with your website. Here are some Segments you may wish to create in Google Analytics:
International Visitors
This will show you how visits from international countries interact with your website. Perhaps there are some good organic keywords with high conversion rates and sales. You can then start a Paid Search campaign targeting these keywords and location to maximise revenue.
Social Media and Email Marketing
Segment all your Marketing Channels. In order to segment Social Media and Email marketing campaigns, you will need to ensure that these channels are properly tagged. This post will help you do this. With proper tagging of these marketing channels, you can view how visits from these channels perform. (Perhaps average page views is a lot less for these marketing channels, prompting you to create more specific landing pages for these channels) Also, with Email marketing correctly tagged, you will be able to see, with Multi-Channel Funnels how Email Marketing ‘fits’ into your Conversion paths.
Brand and Non-Brand Keywords
Segmenting your Non-Brand keywords is always a good idea, it will depict your conversion rate for the more competitive and generic search phrases. Also, you can understand what sort of keyword diversity constitutes to the Non-Brand keyword mix.
Other segments you may want to experiment with include:
Visits that started checkout process;
Store Locator Visits – What Percent of Traffic is looking for your offline stores?;
New vs. Returning Visitors – How do they interact differently; how do conversion rates differ?
With the “new” version of Google Analytics, your custom reports can include Filters, where you can segment your data. In other words, you can extract only the metrics you want, based on specific marketing channels or types of visitors!
