Getting the most out of your Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great, free tool that provides you with a deep insight into how your website is performing. This information is a great weapon in your marketing arsenal as the information helps you keep improving and adapting.

You can use it to view your website traffic, track where users are coming from, what they are doing and why they are visiting your website.

Most business owners only scratch the surface of Google Analytics, but these 5 tips can help you move from novice to pro in a matter of minutes.

Stop tracking yourself

You probably visit your site often, to check it’s working correctly and that things are looking as they should. Unfortunately, this could be skewing your traffic data. To exclude yourself and co-workers from your data, set up a filter under the admin panel. If you have a static IP address, go to All Filters > Add New Filter, and set a Predefined Filter to exclude traffic from your given IP address.

Create custom dashboards

Custom dashboards are great to see the information you want to look at and filter out measurements you’re not too bothered about. Examples of some of the measures you may want could include age and gender demographics, or where your visitors are coming from I.e. social media, organic searches etc. All of this information can be tailored to suit the type of business you want to get.

To set up a custom dashboard go to Dashboards > New Dashboard. You can have up to 20 at any given time. Once you select your opening template, you can add as many widgets as you would like (widgets include both standard and real-time data projections for almost any metric you can think of).

Measure your speed

The download speed of your site can affect your Google rankings, so you have to make sure users don’t spend a lot of time waiting for your site to load. You can check out your site speed metrics in Behaviour > Site Speed > Overview, or Behaviour > Site Speed > Page Timings if you’re interested in how the individual pages of your site are performing. If your site speed is slow (a page load time of over two seconds is slow) make sure your image sizes are the minimum they can be.

Set up Google Webmaster tools

Even though Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to use by itself, integrating Google Webmaster Tools will give you insights that GA can’t offer. It can show you information about your backlinks, impression data, index issues, manual spam actions and organic search keyword impression and click data. When you set up the Google Webmaster account, you gain access to new reports such as queries and landing pages.

Analyse site searches

If you have a search function enabled on your site, you can use Behaviour > Site Search to analyse data on what your users are searching for. Users who search your site are more likely to convert than those who don’t. You can use the site searches to see what they are searching for and strategically publish content related to those search queries.

These tips only represent a small fraction of Google Analytics’ capabilities. But, by implementing them now you can begin to learn more and more about your audience. To learn more, or for help in setting up Google Analytics or Google Webmaster on your website, do not hesitate to contact Snippets Development.