How to Read Google Analytics and Increase Your Sales

We are pretty sure, that there are not a lot of people who didn’t hear about Google Analytics. It was released on November 2005 by Google and now it is the most popular and widely used web analytics feature that is available on the Internet.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for collecting statistics about the website’s activity and efficiency of your online campaigns. It collects the information about how long visitors are staying on your website, how did they get there and which pages have been reviewed. Based on these data Google Analytics creates a report. The correct setting of Google Analytics allows the owner of the resource to see, what is the most interesting for visitors, the website’s popularity, keep up the traffic and conversion. 

Google Analytics accelerates the indexing process and opens up a huge range of opportunities. By installing such a counter on your website, you can find out who, when and why visited your resource and how it got there – by advertising or direct link, through search engines, social networks. It allows you to: 

• Get information about the target audience;
• Evaluate the effectiveness of traffic channels and advertising tools;
• Identify pages with a high bounce rate;
• Analyze the loading time of the site and its pages;
• Track the dynamics of the influx of new visitors by IP address;
• View activity on the site in real-time.

For instance, you can track the number of visitors based on time and calculate whether your new website, pay-per-click campaign or other marketing efforts bring you more hits. Regardless of whether you are a small or large enterprise, Google Analytics can provide effective statistics on what is going on your website. All you need to know now is how to read it.

1. Set Up Your Google Analytics Account 

To set the Google Analytics account, go to the official website and register your account. Then:

1. Navigate to the Admin Tab.
2. Hit under the Account column.
3. Choose “Create new account” at the bottom.
4. Type in the line of Account Name (that might be whatever you want), the website name, then copy and paste the URL of your website, include the “http://” part of it.
5. You can also select the industry type and reporting time zone.
6. You can also choose various Data Sharing Settings. They mostly provide info to Google and do not obligatorily affect the data you will see on your website.
7. Then, you may add your Google Tracking ID to WordPress site through the plugin, using the functions.php or header.php.

2. Audience Overview

It’s will be the first thing that you will see when viewing the Google Analytics dashboard on your website. It is gonna provide you the number of sessions over a specific period. These sessions are mainly visits to your site. The dashboard also reveals data about unique users, the number of page views, the average number of pages per session, the average duration of a session, etc.

Other great data that you can use to tailor your website to your visitors include:

• Interests – users can specify their preferences on Google, such as sport, music, art, food, etc. Make sure that the right people come to your site with it.
• Geo – a place where someone is located is also valuable, especially if you are working in a local business. Keep in mind that your consumers can be roaming before they get to your page, so do not worry about accidentally getting from an isolated location.
• Behavior – this data shows the path traveled by visitors from one page to another. This can help you discover your best pages, as well as identify potential content issues.
• Average session duration – shorter time does not necessarily mean poor performance. It can just talk with the effective UX and UI of your site. Moreover, a session duration does not mean that users interact with your content. They can just get a sandwich. You may also get plugins that measure scroll depth for long-form content.
• Technology and mobile devices. This report displays which device is used to access your site, it might be a desktop computer, smartphone, tablet, etc. It will also display which browser has been used. This information may help you adapt your site to these technologies.

3. Pageviews

One of the simplest but most important measurements of Google Analytics reports is pageviews, that is the number of times a particular page has been loaded. However, loading a page does not necessarily represent a unique user. One user can visit the same page several times in one session, or even several times in a specified time.  The user may also refresh the page for different reasons (lost internet connection, freeze up, etc) which are also considered as a pageview. Google Analytics does not avoid it and offers unique pageview statistics that show you how many different users have viewed a particular page. These data are in the Behavior section of the Site Content and All Pages sections.

Make sure and pay attention to the pages on your website with the highest exit percent. These pages are the pages from which users most often leave your site. If the same page continues to appear, there may be a problem with the content, functionality, or simply a bug. Exit pop-ups can help convert users who want to sign out to email subscribers.

4. Acquisition

This is an indicator by which users and visitors find your site. It is usually divided into four categories:

• Organic Search – if your site is dedicated to most popular music bands, and someone gets to your website by search of “Beatles” or a related term in the search engine, this refers to organic search.
• Referral – if you have a link on a different website, and someone clicked on it to go to your site, this is called a referral.
• Social – someone who finds your site through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or another social media platform falls into this category.
• Direct – when someone directly types the name of your website into their browser, this is a direct acquisition. Also, it works when someone bookmarked your page or create another shortcut to get there.

Information for Acquisitions can be found on your account in the Google Analytics dashboard under the Reporting section, Acquisition, and overview.

5. Visitors and Their Behavior

Now when you know where your visitors are coming from and where they are going, it is important to know what they are doing on your website. A visit is similar to a browser session, they finished when the browser closes, visitors leave your site, or even if they become inactive for more than 30 minutes.

Your Google Analytics reports can display visit numbers that are different from the number of visits in your Google Ads reports. For example, buyers may click on one of your pay-per-click ads several times during a single visit to your site. This will take into account a few clicks, even if it were only for one visit.

6. Users Flow

Find out what your visitors are doing by entering this piece of data. It tells how users access and go through your site. The default setting for this piece of Google Analytics data is the country from which visitors come, the pages on which they are started, and their first interaction. You can easily change the information displayed here.

You can select a number of details on your users, for example, which browser they use, from which city they visit (especially useful if you are a local business), which campaign (in case you are running linked the Google AdWords campaign), which keyword brought them to site, and even user factor. On which page they are starting on and their interaction cannot be changed in this report.

7. Bounce Rate

Briefly, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visit your site, decide that it does not suit them, and leave immediately (within just a few seconds). A pretty good way to solve a high bounce rate is to identify the keywords that visitors use to find the website. Navigate to Acquisition, then choose All Traffic. Then go to “Organic Search” in the table below, or select an indicator that you think is causing the problem. Then you will see the best keywords. You will also receive the number of users, sessions, new sessions, and bounce rates. The higher will be bounce rate, the more keywords and/or content associated with it must be reviewed.

A high bounce rate may also be a sign of some other things:

• Your content is not attracting the readers;
• Your content is not related to keywords or other acquisition ways used to involve visitors to the site;
• Your site is subject to several malicious attacks, such as spam comments, filling out contact forms, or even hacking. The site can also be infected with malware that prevents users from accessing it.

8. Create Goals in Google Analytics

A nice feature of Google Analytics is its ability to allow users to set up their goals. For example, if you want to know if someone who visited your contact page has used one of your options, you can use this function. To use goals in Google Analytics, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Conversions section, then choose Goals and then Overview.
2. Click the button that says “set goals.”
3. Click on the red button that says “new goal” with a plus sign next to it.
4. In the next section, you will have several goals to choose from, including income, acquisition (creating an account), request (for the aforementioned contact page), interaction (for elements such as social networks, sharing, etc.) and even the ability to set individual goal.

Upon completion, the goal will appear in your reporting panel. The types of goals that you may set up include an email or newsletter subscription, filling out a contact form, signing up for social media accounts, watching a video, downloading a product or document, selling a product, and even clicking on a chat. It is important to keep tracking these goals because each page usually has its own CTA, and knowing which pages trigger the most actions is the key to future improvement.

An alternative way to set a goal is to use a custom URL. For instance, if you have a custom landing page, pay particular attention to how many times the URL has been visited in Google Analytics. You can also create a special thank you page to redirect users when they take a specific action, such as registering for an email subscription, buying a product, or filling out a form. Make sure to include short, engaging content for these landing pages to maximize your conversion.

9. Site Speed

Did you know that having a website with slow loading or even a single page with slow loading can adversely affect your ranking in search engines? That’s why Google Analytics has a built-in tool for determining website speed right on the dashboard. The tool report displays how quickly the user can see the page and its contents and interact with it. This allows you to identify the pages that need to be improved, and then track how the improvements work.

The tool provides you three very important pieces of information:

• Page load time – speaks for itself and shows how many seconds it takes the pages of your site to load from various browsers, devices, countries, etc;
• Execution Speed – is the download time of any single event, hit, or interaction with a visitor that you want to track. This includes items such as image download speed, the time it takes for a button to be pressed to respond, etc. You can find this report in the User Timings section;
• Browser Parsing – this data displays how fast the browser parses the

documents and makes it available for interaction with the visitors. You can find it in the Page Timings report on the DOM Timings tab.

To sum up, Google Analytics is an extremely comprehensive, flexible and free tool that helps you track all the processes on your website. However, it is highly important to understand that it may play a critical factor in your business, cause Google Analytics helps you to understand the benefits and drawbacks of your work. After analyzing its reports, you need to make the right conclusions and concentrate your efforts and money on the most effective way. If you don’t know how to do it, do not play with it, cause you may customize it not correctly and experience many loses.

Make it Right with Dewzilla 

While making some experiments with your budget, it is better to rely on the professional team that will take care of your business. Dewzilla is an experienced company that knows what to do to improve your results. Our experts will analyze each step of your Google Analytics and make correct adjustments. By checking channels of traffic we will concentrate efforts and money on the most effective ways that lead to conversions. Also, our experts will analyze your marketing campaigns and increase your business awareness with new methods of approach. Do not waste your time and money anymore, we will help you with all the problems that you have.  

Contact us and our managers will provide you with all the details 

HELLO@DEWZILLA.COM

(447) 366-491-118