Using Google Analytics to Understand Your Site Visitors

By Mike Wheatley | July 7, 2014

No matter how new and shiny your company’s website is, it can’t be considered a success unless you have concrete evidence of how it contributes to lead conversion and completed transactions.

photo credit: Beantin webbkommunikation via photopin cc

Here’s how using Google Analytics can help you transfer your knowledge of a successful sales campaign to that of your site’s performance.

Who’s sending traffic your way?

How did people land up on your site? You can’t know where your customers are going until you know where they come from. Google calls the sites that your web visitors came from “referrals.” The sites that send you visitors are in essence sending you potential clients. Google can also tell you if the leads those sites are sending are qualified in a way, by showing you the “bounce rate”, which refers to how many people take one look at your site and disappear, and how many stay and look around. Low bounce rates mean higher levels of engagement. Where possible, reach out to referring sites by offering quality content or the possibility for increased partnership.

[Find it in Google Analytics: Reporting > Acquisition > All Referrals.]

You should also pay attention to Google’s pie chart of where your traffic is coming from generally (search, social, other sites, and so on). Strive for a balance, so that a sudden change in search algorithms or Facebook won’t tank your traffic.

[Find it in Google Analytics: Reporting > Acquisition > Channels.]

Are visitors doing what you want them to?

Google offers up its goals section as a way to measure how well your site gets visitors to do what you want them to. Let’s say your main objective is to get them to fill out a contact form. You can do this by setting up a “destination” type goal within Google.

[Find it in Google Analytics: Admin > View > Goals > Add Goal.]

Signing up

Of course, none of these tips are any good unless you have Google analytics set up on your site in the first place. If you're unsure how to do so, the following step-by-step guide will show you how:

Go to google.com/analytics and either sign in or create a new account.
Name your Web tracking account, enter your URL information, and let Google know if you want to share information with it (if you don’t, you’ll miss out on some page-ranking data), agree to the service terms, and click the “Create Account” button.
Click on the “Tracking Code” tab.
Tell Google how you want to group your data. If you have a simple domain, stick with the default. If you have subdomains (say, you want to track both store.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com), choose the second option. Choose the third option if you want to roll the analytics of two separate domains into one reporting suite (yourdomain.com and stevesdomain.com).
If you have an AdWords account, link it by checking the related box.
Copy the code that Google Analytics provides at the bottom of the page.
Open your site’s CSS code and add Google’s code into your site’s templates. The code can actually be placed anywhere, but for those who are unsure, the 'footer' is a good place to do so. Simply click on it and paste the code here, just before the </body>.