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As a small business owner, you may feel as though you spend an inordinate amount of time building relationships with and trying to learn more about your customers. After all, the better you know them, the higher the likelihood that you’ll be able to predict what and when they’ll buy.

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool that can help small business owners do just that by revealing a multitude of insights about the behaviors of your customers. But many business owners are intimidated by the platform and unsure where to start.

Today we’re going to highlight 5 easy insights you can use to make Google Analytics work for you.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a platform that helps you track the performance of your website. It collects massive amounts of data, processes it, and creates reports that provide valuable information on how to improve your marketing efforts.

While trying to interpret the extensive data in Google Analytic reports can sometimes feel overwhelming, begin by focusing on the following areas to see how your site and your customers are interacting.

1. Segments

Segments allow you to see how people are interacting with your site…and how they’re getting there.

Default segments tell you how many direct visitors, mobile visitors, and new users visited your site.

Google Analytics also lets you create custom segments. If your business is only working with customers in a particular city, you may find a location segment valuable in helping you learn more about website traffic within that city. The demographics segment can be used to target your customers’ age, gender, and interests, and the social media channel option allows you to create a segment for every social media platform you use and measure the traffic and behavior of visitors from each.

Segments allow you to glean additional information about certain populations within your customer base, allowing you to tailor and optimise your digital marketing.

2. Social Media Performance Reports

Speaking of social media, the social media performance report will tell you if all your hard work promoting your business on Facebook and the gram is paying off.

This report can tell you when customers made a purchase directly from your social media campaigns, or if they visit your site via social media, leave, then return and make a purchase.

3. Average Session Duration

This data tells you exactly how long visitors are staying on your website. As a rule of thumb, the longer a visitor hangs out on your website, the more engaging your content is.

If you find your average duration to be consistently low, you may want to investigate why visitors are leaving so quickly. The answer isn’t always bad—perhaps you have all the information they need conveniently located on the landing page and clients can click, get what they need, and get out in a flash. It’s always a good idea to verify that everything on the page is working and it isn’t broken links that are sending customers away.

4. Bounce Rate

If you have visitors leaving immediately, your site may have a high bounce rate. This goes up when people navigate to your site then leave without ever visiting another page.

Google Analytics can tell you which page on your site has visitors leaving most frequently. Knowing the exit rate for your pages can be helpful in solving problems for your customers. If you have an online store and your checkout page has a high exit rate, there may be an issue with your checkout process that is frustrating users. Or, if guests are leaving your call-to-action page without clicking to sign up for your newsletter, it could be a sign that your CTA needs a little fine tuning.

5. Intelligence Events

If, while gathering copious amounts of information about your website, Google Analytics notices something out of the ordinary, an intelligence report is created, and you receive an alert.

Intelligence events allow you to decide just how big a “big deal” should be before you receive an alert. If you only want reports on things that are super weird (perhaps your bounce rate explodes by 50%), or you’d prefer to see reports for every small anomaly on your page, Google Analytics can make it happen.

Again, there are instances when keeping track of such events can lead to organic marketing opportunities. If an influencer shares your latest blog, leading to a spike in social media conversions or followers that is flagged as an intelligence event, you then can interact directly with the influencer and re-share the interaction on your own social media platforms.

And so…

Don’t let Google Analytics overwhelm you. Taking the time to break it down into smaller, more digestible bites of information allows you to get comfortable with the nuts and bolts before moving on to more detailed reports.

Even the more basic options of Google Analytics can provide you with important information that can improve your digital marketing game.

For results-driven digital marketing strategies, contact Digital Canteen on 02-9025-4304. Discuss all your project details, and our team will get your project started as per your requirements.

Thanks for reading,
Digital Canteen Team
02-9025-4304