Google Analytics Tips for Your Website

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5 Ways to Improve Your Website with Google
Analytics
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Introduction

• Google Analytics is one of the most valuable free
  tools available for website owners, providing
  detailed data about traffic and visitors which
  can be used to evaluate how your content performs
  and attracts new visitors. In this post, well
  look at some of the key metrics Google Analytics
  provides and show how these can be used to
  improve your website.

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Use traffic data to identify underperforming
channels

• Google Analytics acquisition data shows you how
  much traffic you have acquired from each of the
  different channels. These are organic traffic,
  e.g. visitors who have found you from search
  engines direct traffic, e.g. visitors who typed
  your URL into their browser referral traffic,
  those who have clicked on links on other sites
  and social traffic, i.e., those who have come
  from social media platforms.
• With all this valuable information at your
  fingertips, it makes it much easier to understand
  where your websites strengths and weaknesses
  lie. You might, for example, find that you
  perform well on search engines but that you need
  to put more effort into increasing your social
  media traffic.

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Find which pages get the most visitors

• By looking at the Behaviour gt Site Content gt All
  Pages data, youll get a ranked list showing
  which pages get the most visits over your chosen
  timescale. You can also drill down further by
  using the secondary dimension tool to discover
  where the visitors for each page comes from.
• The importance of this data is that it enables
  you to get a better understanding of your
  websites content.
• For example, if pages are not getting much
  organic traffic it hints that you might need to
  look at your SEO or rewrite the content to make
  it more useful to your visitors. Looking at your
  most successful content and figuring out why it
  attracts traffic well, can help you make
  improvements across your site.

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How low is your bounce rate?

• The bounce rate is the term used to describe the
  percentage of visitors who only visit one page
  before leaving. Whilst no web page will ever get
  a 0 bounce rate, some types of pages, such as
  product pages, are more likely to get high bounce
  rates. If someone wants something specific,
  theyll quickly scoot off back to Google if they
  dont find what theyre looking for.
• High bounce rates, however, are a cause for
  concern, especially on your homepage or key
  landing pages. If this is the case, its an
  indication that you may need to make improvements
  to the content or the design in order to get
  visitors to move to other parts of your website.
• It could be that your content is not relevant,
  that the page isnt attractive or easy to read,
  there may annoying popups, or the page may even
  load too slowly for the user to hang around.

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Find issues from analysing session data

• The pages per session data shows you how many
  pages the average user visits when they land on
  your website. Depending on the nature of your
  site, youll have an idea of how many pages you
  would like each visitor to see. If youve an
  eCommerce site or blog, for example, youll want
  a visitor to visit lots of pages, if your site
  has only a couple of service pages then,
  obviously, youll be looking at a smaller figure.
• The importance of this data is that it will tell
  you if you are meeting your optimum figure.  
• The time on page data (found in the behaviour
  section) tells you how much time the average
  visitor stays on each page. This can be very
  useful in understanding how well visitors engage
  with your content and if they actually read all
  the page. It could indicate boring or badly
  written content, information being hard to find
  or something off-putting being mentioned part way
  through.

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Use behaviour flow to discover conversion barriers

• If you run an online business, there will be a
  sales pathway that you want your customers to
  take as they go through your website.
• Using Google Analytics behaviour flow tool, you
  will be able to see how visitors actually move
  through your site where they land, what pages
  they visit as they move and where they exit the
  site.
• Although it is natural to see a drop-off of
  visitor numbers as they head towards the payment
  page, one of the biggest benefits of this tool is
  that it clearly shows where the biggest drop-off
  points are.
• Understanding where these are can help you
  eradicate barriers to sales or other goals.
  Although it is up to you to determine the cause,
  the data will tell you if there is an obstacle at
  that point in the process which prevents users
  completing the sale. Removing that obstacle is a
  clear way to improve your conversion rates.

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Conclusion

• Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for helping
  businesses improve their websites. Its not
  designed to give all the answers, but it does
  provide an insight into where traffic comes from
  and how visitors behave when on-site. From this,
  you can understand what is working well and learn
  which areas need to be improved upon.