Drill? Are we going to Home Depot? Are we starting a blog about drills?
No, no, in this blog we want to learn how to use Google Analytics to “drill down” into your website data. If you are unfamiliar with Google Analytics, read my BLOG from last week to learn the basics. To reiterate, the goal of using Google Analytics for your business website is to:
- Inform decision-making
- Gain understanding of customers and their behavior
- Increase ROI and sales
If you’ve already examined your Exit Pages data but still not sure why some lower-rated pages are causing users to leave your site, then check out In-Page Analytics in the Behavior tab. This tool allows you to see a page as your user does and hover over different areas, like search boxes or shopping carts, and see how many users actually click in that area. When you hover over an area, Google Analytics will show you the percentage of users who clicked there. This could be helpful in showing you which parts of a page are strong and used frequently as you intended and also the opposite, which are weaker or not being used as intended. Is page layout optimal? If the page is critical to your website’s conversion process, you could potentially be losing sales!
Want to reward users who are showing interest on your site, but haven’t actually become buying customers yet? Start using Trackbacks, in the Acquisition tab, under Overview and Social. (Confused? See image.) Trackbacks enable you to return to your website visitors and offer them an incentive, like a coupon or discount, to return to your site and convert.
Google Analytics offers the ability to generate many different reports, and we’re not going to cover them all here. For more in-depth help with reports, see Google’s features section. (scroll down to Data Analytics and Reporting). I do want to mention the Content report, which will help you understand which pages are driving traffic to your website. Each page is given a value, which lets you know how useful it currently is in gaining website traffic. But here’s the catch: you can’t set up your Content report until you set up goals in Google Analytics. Goals help you define what a conversion looks like on your site. If you are an e-commerce site, then a completed purchase is an obvious conversion. If you are in marketing, gathering email addresses for a newsletter is a conversion. Other types of conversions can be length of time spent on a page or clicking the “contact us” area of your site. Google explains it best: “When a visitor to your site or user of your app performs an action defined as a goal, Google Analytics records that as a conversion. That conversion data is then made available in a number of special-purpose reports, which are described below.”
When you click the “Set up goals” button, Google Analytics will walk you through setting up your goals. We recommend setting up no more than 3 goals to start. Goals can also be designated as “macro” or “micro” goals. Macro goals correspond to the primary objective of your site. Micro goals measure customer behavior that might lead to a conversion.
We hope this blog has given you some ideas of how to look beyond the basics of Google Analytics. At Morris Marketing, we use a data-driven approach to help our customers become more successful online. If you need assistance with your business website, call Morris Marketing today at 919-424-8314 .
