It’s no use generating traffic to your website if you don’t know what your visitors are doing when they arrive. Fortunately, Google Analytics can provide you with everything you need to know about your website visitors so you can understand them better.
This will allow you to provide them with exactly what they want, helping you to increase engagement and boost conversions.
Here’s how you can use Google Analytics to get more insights into your visitors today.
Setting Up Google Analytics
First of all, you have to set Google Analytics up so that you can track your website traffic. Doing this is easy. Simply sign up for an account, then to confirm that you own the domain name, Google provides you with a few options.
One of these is copying and pasting some code into your site. It only takes a few seconds to do, and then you can start tracking your traffic. This YouTube video walks you through the process if you need a guide.
Find Out Where Your Visitors Are Coming From
The first important piece of information that Google Analytics can provide you with is where your visitors are coming from, and you can find this info in the Acquisition Reports.
This provides a wide range of information on your traffic sources. Here, you can find out how much of your traffic comes from social networks, advertisements, or the search engines, as well as other sources like direct traffic.
If you have an SEO program up and running, you can track how well this is working by finding out how much of your traffic is coming from organic search, as well as which keywords are leading to website visits. If you are an agency using a white label SEO service, keeping track of the organic traffic is important, so this is one thing you will want to be keeping a close eye on.
Using this, you can get a good idea about the sorts of places that people are finding your website. You might find that a lot more traffic is coming from social media than you thought, and it might be mainly coming from one particular social network.
This can show you where you need to do more work, as well as which areas you should be putting more time into.
Find Out Who Is Visiting Your Site
You can also use Google Analytics to find out more about who is visiting your website, and you can do this with the Audience Reports.
Using these, you can find out details about their locations, and you might find that a lot of your traffic is coming from a country or area of a country that you did not expect.
You can also find out about which devices they are using to find your website as well as the operating systems they are using.
On top of that, you can get details of their demographics, and you can also find out how many of your visitors are new and how many are returning visitors, all of which can be useful in helping you to understand them in more detail.
Find Out How Visitors Interact with Your Site
The Behaviors Reports go into yet more detail, and these are the best tools for finding out about the behavior of your visitors.
Using these, you can find out about the pages your visitors are viewing, the amount of time they spend on each page, and the actions that they have taken.
What is the first page people view when they land? What is the last page? You can find out using these reports, providing you with useful information on what your visitors want.
Track Conversions
The Conversion Reports is slightly more advanced but very useful. You can use it to set up specific conversions like goals for your website. You could set up a conversion as signing up for your newsletter, for example, or watching a video, or simply landing on a particular page.
Using this, you can get a much better idea about what is working on your website, and what you need to change in order to get more conversions.
Get More Insights into Your Visitors
If you have not done so already, set up Google Analytics today. The insights that this free tool can provide you with are invaluable, and you can use it to find out all about the people who are visiting your website, where they are coming from, and what they are doing once they arrive.
This will give you a great deal of information that you can use to increase your understanding of your visitors, allowing you to target them more accurately.
About the author
Isaac Bates started his small business close to 10 years ago and wears many hats in order to keep it going, he’s the website editor, marketing man and accountant to name a few! He’s happy to share his tips, and mistakes, with other small business owners.
