If you don’t have the Google Analytics tracking code on your websites, you are missing out on one of the best tools for tracking search engine traffic. Analyzing search engine traffic helps you lay out content and images, create better marketing campaigns, and evaluate conversions from traffic to customers. Google Analytics also gives you a visual representation of your traffic and conversions, so you can see progress from month to month.
Install the Analytics Code
You need the tracking code installed on your website for Google Analytics to start logging visits. Some website creators such as WordPress offer plugins that let you easily install the code. The code must be present on each of your pages to track all pages on your site.
Open Google Analytics at google.com/analytics/web/#home to get started. Go to the admin section and click “Tracking Info.” Click “Tracking Code,” and you’ll see the tracking code for your site. You must copy this entire code from the opening “” tag. You then paste this code to your web pages’ HTML code. You can display it dynamically or hard code it to the pages.
Make sure you don’t accidentally paste the code more than once. If you paste it more than once, your statistics will be inaccurate.
Data Overview
Within 24 hours of placing the code, Analytics will start to display data. When you first log in to the dashboard, you’ll see an overview of traffic. This is an overview of all traffic, the pages visited per user, and the amount of time the user stayed on the site. One particularly important statistic is the bounce rate. A high bounce rate indicates that users do not engage in your content, and this can be problematic for search engine rank and conversion rates.
Identifying Country Locations
Click the “Location” section in the “Geo” section of the left navigation bar. This section shows you statistics on each country and the number of visitors you receive from each country. This section can help you identify demographics for your visitors, so you can focus on translating pages to different languages. It can also help you recognize if anyone is scraping your content or trying to hack your pages.
Analyzing User Behavior
User behavior is how you understand engagement for your content, links and images. With some experience, you can use this section of Google Analytics to better lay out your site for better conversions. The conversion rate is the number of customers you get from search engine and ad traffic. Conversion rates are usually between 1% and 5% for certain traffic.
The user behavior section gives you the number of times a user returns to a site, and the engagement. Engagement is measured in page views. For instance, if a user navigates to several pages on your site, it’s assumed that the user likes your site. However, if engagement is only one or two pages, you know you need to change the content or layout on the pages.
Technology
The technology section tells you devices, operating systems and browsers used to access your site. This metric is important for your programming such as CSS layout and JavaScript. Older browsers don’t support some of the newer technologies such as HTML 5, Ajax and CSS. If you use any of these technologies heavily, it can mean you need to create pages for these users or adjust your code to cater for the majority of your traffic.
Mobile
The mobile section helps you with mobile technology, so you can identify the tablets and smartphones visitors use to access the site. Responsive web design is the latest trend to deal with these different browsers. Responsive web design resizes your website, so the pages fit to the screen size and the images render faster.
Navigating a full-size website on a small screen can make it difficult for users, and more people use smartphones and tablets for shopping and browsing the Internet. For this reason, you should keep watch on mobile device usage on your site, and add responsive design.
Setting Up Goals
After you review each section in Google Analytics, it’s time to set goals. The goals section lets you assign revenue, inquiry, acquisition or engagement goals. For new site owners, you might want to focus on engagement, so you can tweak the website until it users engage the content more often.
Revenue goals are for bigger businesses with ads and monthly conversion and sales goals. You set this type of goal when you own an ecommerce store, you set up ads and you need to know how well your marketing campaigns are working. These statistics help you determine the most efficient marketing campaigns, so you can target money at ads that bring in the best revenue at the lowest cost.
Integrating Adsense
You can also integrate Adsense with Analytics. Integration allows you to observe how your ads are converting, so you can move them around for the best ad revenue. You need an Adsense account, which means you must apply through the Adsense channel. Adsense requires that you have a fully functional blog or content site before you are approved. If you plan to run Adsense on a blog, the blog must be filled with content, and you need to be active for at least six months.
Once you get used to the Google Analytics interface, you can use this tool to make specific changes to your site and marketing efforts that can make much more income than current efforts. Google Analytics isn’t easy from an analysis standpoint. You need to understand your users and the data that Google gives you in the dashboard. It can take several months to get used to it, but the end result can be a much more optimized site with much better revenue and conversion rates than you have currently. Pay attention to the numbers and log in to Analytics each morning to decide what you need to do to the site. With enough know-how and traffic, you can turn your website into a moneymaking machine.
