So I talked a lot about with my clients, the smart objectives. So this is objectives for your business or for your website or anything what you do in life, which is so the smart objectives are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound.
So in regards to Google Analytics the important one is M for measurable. So there’s no point in having a website out there. If we’re not actually learning about whether that website is working for us, you could have 10,000 visitors coming to your website. But if you don’t know that 10,000 visitors who come to your website and be what those visitors are doing when they get to your website, there is absolutely no point in having a website at all.
It’s just of no use to your business, so I would thoroughly and encourage you whether it’s Google Analytics or any other stats tool and to have a a tool on there, which is grabbing those stats for you. So you can learn about your audience and how better to engage them. One of the first benefits of installing Google Analytics on on your website is actually its influence. It has on how your your website gets indexed, so if you’re using analytics and Google automatically knows that you’ve added a page to your to your website so and how it does this is when that page goes live you go and look at it.
It triggers Google Analytics and to load, and then it says oh well, this is a new page. I need to add it into my index unless you’ve switched it off using the robots and txt file. What this means is so Google also has a an automatic submission tool, so you have to manually sorry not on automatic and manual submission tools. You have to go and submit your your web pages manually. This just takes that that take takes out that extra step, so so long as you’re using Google Analytics.
Google knows, and whenever you add a new website web page to your website and it’ll index it within I’ve, seen it happen with the matter of hours 24 hours evening. The second tip which I’ve got is about understanding your visitors. So the key thing about the visitors to your website is looking at the they used to be called unique visitors, but it’s now sessions. They introduced that within the last sort of twelve months people used to talk about hits now hits could mean that you can load up a single webpage, but there could be a hit for every image that loads on that page and for the JavaScript in for the Style sheets – and things like that, so one webpage could generate 50 hits.
So that’s why we’re really interested in unique visitors or sessions to the website, because these are individual, unique people who are visiting your website. And this means that you can average that that data out over a period of time and see how many individual people are coming to your website and interacting with it over a and you know a minute-by-minute. If you want to get real-time information, but probably most people look at their stats on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and this just allows you to give benchmarks and what those benchmarks allow you to do is that if all of a sudden, you see a dip In your website traffic, you can react to it so if, for example, you’ve uploaded a page of content which violates Google’s Terms and additions, for example, so they’re no longer listing your page and search engine, you can react to it D list that page go and tell Google about it and hopefully get that traffic back up because don’t forget nowadays, most people to validate a business they’ll go and have a look at their website.
If your website’s not being indexed in Google they’re, not going to be able to find you equally. If most of your website, traffic is driven through organic and search engine results, and your website disappears off planet you’re going to lose that business, your business could go under so keeping an eye on how your website is performing. If you start to see it tail off, you can react and hopefully and build that traffic back up to where it was before.
The third thing I want to talk about is and the different what a pageviews and fountain what constitutes the bounce rates? It’s a really common. I do a lot of workshops in this and it’s the most common question. What’s the bounce rate, so bounce is basically when somebody lands a new homepage and they leave without engaging with the site or basically doing anything, so they don’t scroll down. They don’t click on the link, they don’t read a article.
They don’t do anything and by default, that period of time is 30 minutes, and so, if somebody landing site doesn’t do anything with it for 30 minutes, then that’s considered to be a bounce. You can manipulate that. I think you can tell Google to reduce the bounce rate on your website if you want to, but typically if I mean, if they haven’t done anything in the first sort of 10, 20 30 seconds, probably unlikely to do anything with your website.
Anyway, so so Google displays this bounce rate metric and through analytics. The next thing I want to talk about is goal conversions and funnels so goal conversion. I talked about in a previous article about and the three things that happen within seven seconds. So the message you’ve got to get across is who we are, what you do and where do you want your customers to go to next so that where to next is and what we call a goal conversion? Ultimately, we want something to land on your website and either and pick up the phone or submit a contact form or buy products for me.
So so you can tell Google and Google Analytics what that goal. Conversion is so, let’s call it a contact form submission. The funnel is how they reached that point. So we create a funnel. A simple funnel might be land on the homepage. They go to the contact page and then they hit submit so there’s three steps in that. Funnel we want to and the way the reason why funnels are important is, it might be the let’s say you have thousand visitors to the website.
100 of them hit the contact button, but none of them have, and none of them are completing the goal. Well. Okay, now, what we can do is see where customers are dropping out at that funnel. Maybe we’ve got too many form fields in the contact or maybe the contact forms is broken, so this gives us an opportunity if we see that as a dropping out our particular points in that funnel that you’ve created for them.
You can react totally web developer to go in there and fix it. One thing which changed and quite dramatically probably about two or three years ago, with Google Analytics and another question which I started to get asked quite often was you can you can have a look at the keywords which people have put into Google and view those on On through analytics to see what keywords people have searched on in order to land on your website and there’s this one specific keyword that people started to realize was just gaining in popularity for every single website and it was something called not provided.
So I kid you not at the top of the list keywords on everybody’s google analytics and starting to become not provided, and now it accounts for about 90 % of keywords which people search on so now, people aren’t actually searching for the keywords not provided and ended Up on ending up on your website, the reason why it’s happening is because most search is now on Google and, if you look at on the URL and you’ll, see a little padlock icon and it will say HTTPS instead of HTTP, you know forward slash, Google com, So those searches people are doing being pushed through a secure, socket layer, HTTPS so through a secure layer and what Google does is it just obfuscates them? So you can’t actually see what those keywords are.
So it does that for privacy reasons to protect the person who’s browsing the web so now you’re getting loads of really useless information about keywords through Google Analytics, which is really frustrating so the workaround for it there is a workaround, it’s pretty straightforward! You can install something called Google Webmaster Tools onto your website and if you’ve got Google Webmaster Tools installed on your website and you can actually see what and searches are being carried out and resulting in your web page being delivered in the search results before people get To your website, through and through Google Webmaster Tools, so you’ve actually got access to that list of keywords and through another Google tool, it’s just really frustrating that you can’t see it through Google Analytics.
So that’s the Google not provided workaround and which there’s more information about it on my website or if you google, for it I’m sure you’ll be able to find a plethora of different tips how to work around it. So, just to summarise those key points, the reasons why Google Analytics is really important. So first it talks about smart objectives. Google Analytics allows you to measure the prompt to your website and happy for interacting with your website, and it has an immediate impact on how quickly can get pages indexed in Google search engine.
We can see how many unique visitors are coming to our websites and and measure that on a regular basis, we can have a look at bounce rates and see see whether people are landing on the page and how well they’re interacting on it and how many pages They’re actually viewing and finally, we look at goal. Conversions been creating funnels to track people right the way through to a call to action which we’ve created for them and at what point they’re dropping out of that process.
So I hope you found the article really helpful and thank you for reading. Don’t forget if you want to read more articles than please hit the subscribe button and if you’ve got any questions about this specific article, then please leave them in the comments box below I’d. Be more than happy to answer them!
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