5 Keys to Unlocking the Power of Google Analytics The volume of raw data available with Google Analytics is daunting, until you learn a few essential concepts.
By Rocco Baldassarre Edited by Jessica Thomas
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Google Analytics is a very useful tool that allows you to track what sources sent visitors to your site and what they did once on it. Check out these ten points to make the most of of Google Analytics.
1. Understand the meaning of bounce rate.
The bounce rate does not indicate how many people leave your website right after landing on it but how many people leave the website without visiting another page. For instance, in case of a single page website, you will always have a high bounce rate because the only way to visit a second page is to reload the website!
If your bounce rate is high, you should work on improving your website (or landing page) design, the quality of your traffic sources and your content.
Related: Easy Ways to Keep Visitors on Your Website Longer
2. Understand the meaning of session duration.
Google does not start a timer that measures the seconds users spend on your site. They calculate the average sessions duration based on the difference between the time you entered the first page and the time you entered the last page. If you have events set up, Google is going to consider the last engagement hit on the last page instead of the time of the first hit on the last page.
It can happen that some site visits will display a 0 seconds time on site. This refers to people not taking any action (hits) following to entering the page.
3. Not all sources tag your links automatically.
Tagging a link means adding parameters to an url that won't affect its functionality of the site but that allows you to track where visitors are coming from. For instance, let's suppose you are sending a newsletter and you want to know how many people end up performing a given action on your site. Tagging the website links in your newsletter will allow you to do that.
Building a tag is easy and can be done for free at this link.
Related: Three Secrets to Using Google Analytics for Measuring Your Website's ROI
4. Importing analytics goals in AdWords.
Analytics allows you to create goals and then import them in AdWords for tracking purposes. However, the conversions will not show up right away but they take up to 24 hours to sync. Just consider this while optimizing the account and don't rush a decision until you are sure you are looking at the proper data
5. Link Analytics to AdWords and AdWords to Analytics.
Linking Google Analytics to AdWords allows you to track all the information of your campaigns in analytics and find out patterns to maximize profitability. At the same time, you can link the two platforms from AdWords. This gives you the possibility to import new columns in AdWords, such as the bounce rate, time on site and pages viewed per session.
This is very useful to analyze the performance of keywords not only in terms of conversions but also based on other relevant parameters.
Google Analytics gives you a lot of data and it is very important to learn how to interpret it in order to improve your performance. In addition to the points above, focus on finding the pages that cause the highest exit rate on the website, the geographic areas with the best customers and the age range and gender that works the best. You will be able to use this data across several marketing channels!
