Google Analytics is a very robust, advanced tool that provides business owners with invaluable data and analytical information not only for SEO but also for marketing and business strategy purposes.
Those new to reading and understanding website traffic may find the tool overwhelming at first, as Google Analytics can be used for very complex matters. But there are a handful of metrics that are simple to understand and track yet provide powerful and fundamental information regarding who the visitors are, how they find your website, and how they are navigating and interacting with it.
Knowing this information is crucial because having a functioning website with standard content and calls to action is no longer enough. With so much global competition, business owners have to dig deeper to understand how real people use their sites so that they can continuously refine and streamline the experience toward the optimal point. To convert digital passersby to actual paying customers, you need to give them exactly what they want, how they want it. Below are some Google Analytics metrics that help you do that.
Real-Time Traffic
The real-time report is simultaneously one of the most overlooked and valuable features in the entire tool. As evident by its title, the real-time report shows who is on your website at the moment and gives you information about who is logged in and what pages they are visiting. This is a handy tool for event testing, such as click tracking and scroll depth tracking events, or monitoring the performance of an ad campaign as it happens.
Geographical Location Data
Another excellent actionable data that you can get from Google Analytics is the physical location of your traffic. Having access to location-specific demographic information of visitors helps businesses better understand their target markets. This knowledge can, in turn, be used to improve marketing and advertising efforts for more efficient and cost-effective results.
Traffic Source
In addition to the geographical location of visitors, Google Analytics can tell you about the source of the traffic that comes to your site. For example, the tool is able to discern if a user has found your site through a search engine, has typed your URL directly, or selected it from a bookmark.
Keeping track of these acquisition metrics will give you insight into how effective your campaigns are. For instance, you can expect an increase in organic search traffic if you plan to crank up your inbound marketing efforts. If that doesn’t happen, you know your performance in that regard is lacking.
Speed Performance
Site speed is an important ranking factor for SEO, but many people may not know what they need to fix to improve it. And sometimes, simple actions are enough to get the speed up to acceptable levels, which can enhance the user experience and, ultimately, the SEO.
Google Analytics can provide that information with its site speed report, which provides all the factors that affect the speed of your site.
Device Usage
Google Analytics also offers you information on what devices people are using in order to visit your website. Do your visitors predominantly use mobiles and tablets, or do they primarily browse your site via desktop computers? Having access to this information can help you a lot not only from a technical standpoint (e.g., mobile-friendliness, responsive web design) but also in terms of content strategy and information structuring and packaging.
Content Performance Measurement
Since Google Analytics is very adept at measuring visitor behavior, we can use it to understand how well each URL or piece of content is performing. Which pages are attracting the most visitors? Which pages are getting the most views? What content strategy is working and what is not?
We can adjust our marketing funnel to maximize conversion by analyzing content performance. One way to do this, for example, is to repurpose the most popular pages into landing pages and direct visitors to our desired action further down the funnel.
Behavior and Navigation
In addition to knowing how your visitors are attracted to your site, you can also keep track of how they travel through it. Google Analytics behavior flow report tells you a variety of useful information, such as where people are landing on your site, how they are moving from one page to another, and where the drop-offs are. This will give you a pretty good idea about what pages you have to optimize.
Conversions
Perhaps, the single most important metric for the majority of business-based websites is conversion. In Google Analytics, conversions are used to report on the most important actions taking place on your website; These actions could be anything from completing a form, subscribing to the newsletter, or making a purchase. These conversions can serve as key performance indicators used for tracking progress and assessing the effectiveness of marketing efforts.