You might only just be getting into the back end of your website, and you’ve found all of these magic numbers. Google Analytics is giving you a range of data, and you’re not 100% sure what you can use it for. While it is nice to know what your bounce rate is, how your traffic is looking, and the location of buyers – that is just the surface. The importance of data analytics is much deeper than that. There are many things that you can do to turn your analytics data into actionable steps that will improve your business ten-fold.
Referral Traffic
You can improve on your referral traffic by learning where it is coming from and capitalizing on it. Click Behavior, then Site Content, and then Landing Pages. You should now see a table that includes details of your referral traffic.
Referral traffic is when someone comes to your site via another website. You might see many social media platforms in this section too. And while they are great to have, you can probably double down on your efforts elsewhere. If you find a few websites that are giving you constant traffic, then you might want to check out why. If you put together a list of the sites that are giving you the referrals (outside of social media websites), you can get in touch. Perhaps you have some content that you could provide them with a backlink on, or there might be some cross-promotion possible.
Content Quality
There are two stats that everyone talks about. Bounce Rate and Average Session Duration. Both of which are vital indicators of how good your content is. You would ideally like to see a low bounce rate and a high session duration. This means people are spending time on your website, rather than clicking to it and leaving again quickly. It goes some way to indicating how good your content is, and how well targeted it was for that reader.
If you have a high bounce rate, there are a couple of reasons this might be:
- Your content didn’t match the reader
- It is a regular reader who was consuming new content
- Your UX is not user-friendly
- Your adverts or pop-ups felt invasive
You can run some A/B tests on various web pages to see which performs better and refine your content strategy. Make sure that you give the reader a direction to head to next. Like your previous post, a post on the same subject, or a link to the product you’re talking about.
Site Search Opportunities
This is digging for gold in your own backyard. There are probably plenty of things that people search for while on your website. To find them, you head to Behavior, then Site search and finally Search Terms. This will show you all of the searches that people have created on your website. If you find you have a few searches coming up often, you can rework and expand that content.
When you take some time to dig into all of the data you have at your fingertips, you will find a plethora of ways to improve your website and the user experience with it.
