But how do you get inside their brains? How do you know what they think of your killer content? Well thanks to Google Analytics not only will you find out what they like best (and least) but also how they got there and where they went after they left. When you make a website, GA will track your visitors’ digital footprints like a private investigator.
Let’s start with the basics then we’ll talk about how to use the data.
Bare Bones Data
On the dashboard in the lower right corner you’ll see Content Overview which will list the 5 pages with the highest number of views. If you click on “view report” you will be taken to the content details.
At the top of this section you’ll see a graph that displays the total daily views and if your website is like most, that graph will have peaks and valleys pretty evenly spaced. If you look at the dates of the valleys you’ll probably discover they are all weekend days and the peaks will be midweek days.
Dropping down will be a report that will rank all of the pages by views. Click on “view full report” and every page that had at least one view will be displayed. This is basically the results of your page popularity contest. This report will give you total views, unique views, time on page, bounce rate and what percentage left or exited the website from a particular page.
To drill down even further, click on the page name. This report will recap the data but also provides you with navigational data that tracks where the traffic came from (externally or from an internal page) and where they went after they left (exit or to another page). This can be critical information particularly in identifying a dog where the bulk of the visitors exit.
Keyword Performance
So now you know where each visitor came from when they arrived on a page, how long they stayed and if they were satisfied enough to want more and visit another page or if they split. That’s important stuff but there’s another report that is exceptionally important in evaluating your SEO and planning PPC campaigns.
Under Landing Page Optimization there is a keyword report. This report will show you, by page, what keywords led a visitor to the content. Not only that but how long they stayed and how many abandoned ship rather than moving on to another page. Find the winners and losers and reinforce the winners and change the losers.
So what should we be asking ourselves when we review this data?
1. What are the most popular pages?
Check out the five most viewed pages and then check the bounce rate and exit rate. Are those percentages low? If so your most visited pages have value to your traffic. The next question is, are those 5 pages the 5 pages you want to be the most popular? If you set out to make a website to sell something, and your sales page isn’t on that list you may want to figure out what you can do to change the offer to make it more attractive or increase the number of internal links to the page.
2. What pages have the highest “bounce” rate?
It’s a real bummer if you have a page that has generated a lot of views only to see that 80% or more of the bounce. A bounce is defined as a single page visit. The visitor arrives and departs from the same page. If you have this situation, you have to make that page more attractive or make navigation to a second page easier. You worked hard to get the visitor now work a little harder to keep him or her.
3. What pages have least time on page?
You have less than 5 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention and get them to stay on the page. If you have pages full of content and your visitors are blowing it off inside of 10 seconds then that’s a clue that the content wasn’t perceived as having value for the search query. Strong headlines and images will help engage the reader and give you a shot at keeping them on the page.
You could literally spend hours analyzing your content but if you are new at this, just focus on fixing those sites where exits are high and time on page is low. If you can stop those visitors from departing you will have plugged a traffic leak and then you can get into the more esoteric tweaking.
