When you know what to look for, website analytics benefits are seemingly endless. By providing data on a variety of site performance metrics, you’re better able to understand where your site’s succeeding and where it might be falling short.
If you’re looking for ways to improve traffic, figure out the best ways to market your site and bolster brand recognition online, analytics are one of the best places to start. Plus, using Google Analytics is free, so you have nothing to lose.
1. Where Your Traffic Comes From
In order to help your website rank better, Google Analytics gives you a variety of reports and tools to measure results. One of the most important things you’re able to learn is where your traffic comes from. For instance, is it social media, organic search results, ads, blog posts, etc.? Once you know your most popular sources, you’re able to better focus your marketing efforts.
For example, if blog posts are driving the most traffic, you know you have a great keyword strategy in place and should maybe add an extra post per week.
2. Conversion Rates
When it comes to analytics benefits, learning your conversion rate ranks near the top of the list. At first, the number might be discouraging. For instance, it might only be a few percent. However, this is a complex metric. A “good” conversion rate varies greatly based on industry. Numbers range anywhere from 2% to over just over 11%. So, you’ll want to create a baseline not only for your brand’s goals, but the industry average.
If your number is far lower than it should be, this indicates you may need to adjust the information you ask for, offer a better incentive to visitors or change your CTA.
3. How People Navigate Your Site
There are numerous metrics in Google Analytics that help you understand how people navigate your site. You’ll learn their entrance and exit pages, how many pages per visit, time spent per page/site visit, bounce rate and general engagement. Use these analytics to discover the strongest and weakest areas of your site.
Learn if your site is easy to navigate. Page jumping too quickly could mean visitors aren’t finding what they need. Or, if they’re following a certain set of pages, it means your visitor journey is working as expected.
4. Types Of Traffic
One of the more important analytics benefits is learning your types of traffic. Yes, a lot of traffic is always a great thing, but is it all new visitors or do you have a growing number of a repeat visits? Ideally, you want a good mixture of both. Repeat visits mean your site impressed someone and they’re returning. It also means a better chance of organic word of mouth referrals online and offline.
5. Individual Page Performance
While measuring your entire site’s performance is great, you’ll learn far more by looking at individual page performance. The analytics benefits from individual page stats let you quickly see which pages are performing best and which ones are falling short. Use this data to fix troublesome pages and adjust your strategy based on your higher performing pages.
Analytics are a website owner’s most valuable tools. Quickly and easily make performance enhancing adjustments to your site by hosting via WordPress. Contact us today to learn how we can help.