Website Analytics – Beyond the Dashboard

**PLEASE NOTE: This is not meant to be an in-depth analysis of Google Analytics, but rather a basic overview of what people can find if they dig a little and start using their analytics program past the dashboard. We’ll be giving an overview of the various sections and how it might help you with your overall marketing efforts.

More often than not when speaking with clients and or potential clients about their analytics they often only refer to a few things, visitors, hits, and/or keywords. This leads me to believe that many companies don’t ever look past the dashboard of their analytics program. They don’t dig down to really see what is going on with their website. In this post, I’m going to do my best to explain the various areas of Google Analytics and what it can show you as a client. We use Google Analytics as an example because most people can relate, and if you don’t have a GA account, your analytics program most likely has similar areas (dive in and you’ll be surprised by what you find!).

*All images are screen shots are courtesy of Google Analytics - https://www.google.com/analytics - all data has been removed to protect the site being analyzed.

Below we will show you some of the different areas available via the left navigation bar of Google Analytics, as well as giving some insight as to what you can find within that particular area and how it might be useful to you and your organizations marketing efforts. Please keep in mind that there are many other ways in which the different areas can be useful to you, but our examples will help those who have never look into them.

Visitors Section:
In this section you will find another dashboard that gives you an overview of data from the different areas dealing with visitors.

• Benchmarking – In this area you can compare your sites that are relatively the same size as yours. You can also select which industry category your site falls under so you get an even better idea of how your site stacks up. This is a great way to see how well your site is performing compared to the rest of the industry in a broad view.


• Map Overlay – This area lets you see what countries/regions your website visitors are coming from. It even shows you on a colored scale, which countries are referring more visitors than others. It may not seem important at first, but if you have a campaign targeting Europe, you could look here quickly and see whether or not it’s working (generally speaking).


• New vs Returning – Here you can see what percentages of visitors are new versus visitors that have come back to your site after already having visited you at least once. Again his is great to look and to get a quick view of whether your site is gaining any new potential customers/clients.


• Languages – Just what you thought it would be, this area gives you an idea of what languages the people who visited your site spoke. So let’s say you have been debating whether or not to have different translated version of your site. You can quickly come up with a priority list of which languages you should concentrate on and in what order.


• Visitor Trending – This area is packed full of information. You can see how many of your visitors are unique each day, how many page views each visitor had, what your bounce rate is, how much time the average visitor spent on the site, etc. The usefulness of this data is endless, you can easily see whether you are keeping visitors at the site long enough to make a purchasing decision, or whether your site is “stickie” by seeing how high your bounce rate is.


• Visitor Loyalty – Want to know how many times repeat visitors are coming to your site? You can get the breakdown of what percentage of visitors came back once, as opposed to two or three times or more. If you have a social networking community this would be extremely important information to have, as you certainly want to have your return rate as high as possible to keep the community active.

There are other areas in this section (Browser Capabilities and Network Properties) that get into the more technical aspects of your website. For example what browsers visitors are using to see your site. This would help your web designer when considering what to implement and how to test the site. Since this post is geared more towards the average company owner, we’ll stick to the areas that will have the most value to you (not that it’s not valuable information, but chances are you aren’t coding your own site!)

Traffic Sources Section:
In this section you will find another dashboard that gives you an overview of data from the different areas dealing with where your traffic is coming from.

• Direct Traffic – Here you can see the number of visits that you received by the visitor typing in your website address directly into the address bar of the browser. This is a good indicator of how memorable your website address is.


• Referring Sites – These reports let you quickly and easily see what sites your visitors were at that linked them over to your site. Knowing where your visitors are coming from can give you some great insight on whether that link you got on a related site was worth it or not.
  
• Search Engines – As you might guess this section lets you see which search engines are referring traffic and how much. You may think that Google is the end all be all, but a quick look at this report can fill you in what other search engines matter to your visitors.
  
• Keywords – Want to know what people actually typed in to find your website? You can, you just need to look here! That’s right, this area lets you see what your website visitors actually typed into the search engines to find you. Thinking of doing a PPC campaign, this is a great place to start when trying to figure out good keywords to use. A great post was recently written on the value of analytics and this section when doing keyword research by Unstuck Digital – Leveraging Analytics for Keyword Research.
  
• Adwords – Do you currently have an Adwords campaign running? Great, you can track its effectiveness here. Drill down and see on a granular level what people did after clicking your ad.

Content Section:
In this section you will find another dashboard that gives you an overview of data from the different areas dealing with what content your visitors are seeing and going to.

• Top Content – What content/pages are your visitors going to the most? Within this section you can see what content is most viewed. This is extremely valuable because if you know that a particular product page is getting most of the views, you might think of adding a call to action or reference link to other areas of the site or to order now!


• Content Drilldown – What path did your visitors take once on the site? You can see that here, figure out which pages they viewed, and in what order they viewed them in. This helps in figuring out if the site you thought was intuitive really is as intuitive as you thought.


• Top Landing Pages – The home page isn’t always the first page that website visitors see! That’s right, you read that correctly. Search engines try to provide the page that matches the closest with the search that was performed, so now you’ll know what pages are matching those searches.


• Top Exit Pages – Just as important as the landing pages are the exit pages. What pages are people leaving your site at? Let’s say you run an ecommerce store and aren’t getting the number of orders you think you should be. One look at this could tell you that a majority of your visitors are leaving at the check-out first step. Now you can look and see why that might be.
  
• Site Overlay – Ever wondered what buttons on a particular page are being used most often? Well now you can, this section lets you see the number of clicks on any linked part of that page whether they be navigation links, body text links, etc. Thought everyone would click the big red buy now button but they aren’t? Try it in a new spot and watch to see what happens, or change the color and see the effect.\

Now these sections are not the only ones in Google Analytics but if the dashboard was your main information source before, just going into these three main areas will give you a whole new wealth of knowledge about your site and visitors. You don’t have to be a ‘computer geek’ to understand the information either. Even having the most basic understanding will help you in conversing with your marketing team.

Remember: Knowledge is power, and analytics is powerful knowledge.

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Ignite MediaLLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization