A successful website is a definite must-have in the 21st century. But in order to maintain and improve your site’s performance, you need to understand how people are finding it, as well as where you have opportunities to be found. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that gives you tremendous insight into your website traffic. To help you fully utilize the tool, we invited Brenda Newhouse, owner of Newhouse Studios Web Strategy, to guide you through “Using Google Analytics to Grow Your Business.”
In this summary, you can get her tips on how to use three sections of the Google Analytics dashboard, so you can figure out where to invest your marketing budget.
Read the Summary
1. Audience
Under the “Audience” tab of your dashboard, the best section you really need to pay attention to is your “Overview.”
Brenda recommends using your overview to compare your site performance — including the amount of users and average pages per session — over similar time frames, like your first quarter and second quarter. Just update your date range on the top right corner, then select a second date range by checking “Compare to.”
This can give you insight into how your website traffic has changed and if it’s performing better or worse. However, Brenda says you’ll need to wait until you have about three months of analytics before you’ll really know what metrics are normal, good or bad for your business.
2. Behavior
From the “Behavior” section of your dashboard, head to “Site Content,” then “All Pages.” Turn off the date comparison feature if you haven’t already, so you can focus on activity during one time frame only.
This “All Pages” section is best for figuring out what the most popular pages on your site are. You’ll also see the time spent on and sales generated by each page. If you’re noticing any disparities (like a high-traffic page with low sales), this may be an opportunity for you to optimize it (for example, adding a CTA to the page to generate more sales).
3. Acquisition
The “Search Console” section of your “Acquisition” tab tells you all about where you get your traffic from.
To start, tap on “Landing Pages” under “Search Console.” The pages that show up here are your entry points, or what pages people are clicking into from Google. For each page, you can see data like your:
- Impressions: How often it shows up in search
- Clicks: How many people clicked in from search
- CTR: Your website click-through rate
- Average position: Where you show up on a search engine result page on Google
You can compare all this to the amount of sales you generate to figure out where you need to improve.
One extra tip that Brenda offers is to click on the individual URLs listed under “Landing Pages.” When you do so, you’ll see what specific keywords people are actually using to find each specific page. If you find that your page rank is low or slipping for any of these keywords, this is an opportunity to re-optimize the page for that keyword.
Beyond your “Landing Pages” section, you can also take a look at:
- “Devices,” to figure out what devices people are finding you from
- “Queries,” to find ideas for blog posts based on what terms people are searching, but you site’s not yet optimized for
- “Overview,” to see if you’re getting more traffic from organic search, referrals, or other sources, so you know what to invest in
Setting up Google Analytics
So how do you set up Google Analytics on your website? While you can DIY the whole setup, Brenda does suggest having a web developer do it for you. What can be time-consuming and complex for you can take just a few minutes for your developer to complete.
Just make sure your developer sets you up as the primary account holder (you’ll need a Google account), so you never lose access to data.
If you do plan on setting it up yourself, Google and website builders like WordPress and Shopify offer Google Analytics setup guides in their help pages. Brenda also recommends the following resources for setting up and diving deeper into the tool:
- Loves Data
- Google Analytics Academy
- LinkedIn Learning (for paid accounts)
One last note: Make sure you set up Google Search Console to actually start getting search data through your dashboard. Again, your web developer can help you out.
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