Day 1 of our Learn from Us Week series. Today the topic is Getting Better with Google Analytics. How can your business change and change again fast with these top tips?

Google Analytics is a great way to help you grow your audience and generate new bookings, review your content strategy and provide insight into your campaigns. We all want to truly find our audience, Google Analytics can help. You should be using it daily, but are you? Make that change today, here are some handy tips:

Know the lingo

Ever feel a bit left out of the conversation? Get to know the lingo – it’ll help you understand what GA can do and help you make informed decisions on what the key measures mean. I’ll start with two of the basic measures that often confuse people. Bounce vs. Exit rates.

• Bounce Rate – The bounce rate has nothing to do with a ball. It’s the potential customers on your website and they might be leaving your site without finding out more about you. This is the percentage of people who go to just one page on your site and then leave. If you have a high bounce rate, there’s not enough interesting things or tabs to keep them clicking on other pages to find out more about you.
• Exit Rate – Exit rate is the page that is the percentage of people that left your site on that specific page. It could be the 1st or 31st page on your site they have looked at but, importantly, it’s the page they left on. That’s what makes it different from the bounce rate. Exit rate is useful because you can identify if pages on your site are putting people off your organisation. Or it might even flag a technical problem with the page e.g. ‘sorry this page is not loading’. Check your exit % out today.

Does your content need work?

Google Analytics is a great tool to measure the behaviour of people looking at your website. This is especially useful for your Newsletters. On Google Analytics: Click Behaviour – Site Content – All Pages. On All Pages you can search for keywords on your URL for a specified time period. You can drill down to what content is most popular on your site, what pages put people off, what is the average time spent on the page, how many unique visitors you’ve had. It’s golden information. Everyone has an idea about what content they think works for their audience, THIS IS YOUR EVIDENCE. It helps to shape content strategy going forward.

Top Tip – Give your URL pages unique names. E.g. If you are promoting ‘Google Analytics Advice’ have your URL as www.culturerepublic.co.uk/trends/googleanalyticsadvice (I’ll be checking open rates for this news piece and hope you don’t bounce or exit here, so don’t hurt my feelings :( ) not www.culturerepublic.co.uk/1234242 – this will help you to run a search for it on GA.

Set Goals on Google Analytics

Goals will tell Google when something you wanted to happen actually happens. So your websites are likely to be used to generate leads, and/or ticket sales. If you have a website where you sell tickets, you’ll want to create a final thank you or confirmation booking page for visitors to land upon once they have completed a purchase. By setting up a goal to track the thank you page – you can tell as and when someone buys your tickets. Useful for finding out your key sale times and plan to promote events accordingly.

Getting more with Google

If you would like to find out more about Google Analytics, let’s talk at the Learning Week in November.  I’d be happy to take a look at your site and give you some advice. Remember we are here for additional consultancy too. Contact us to discuss.