How to know your website visitors better.
One thing I love most about working at Nextfly is how we have the opportunity to work with a client’s website from the absolute beginning when the client approached us with an “idea”, a new business, or just a simple thought of a rebrand and we turned it into a functioning digital marketing platform.
Once it’s live, however, there are still a lot of questions that begin needing answers including the following:
•Who is visiting and when?
•What are their ages?
•Are they new or are they coming back?
•How did they find me?
•What are they searching for?
•What is your top content?
•What are your worst performing pages?
All of these questions and more can be answered with the help of Google Analytics reports and I want to point you in the direction of where you can find this information. Let’s start with the first question:
Who is visiting and when?
When you log into your Google Analytics account you can go to the “Audience Overview” section and it’ll give you a snapshot of useful information of what’s going on on your website. Choose from the last week to the last month and even the last year and you’ll discover a wealth of knowledge.
Not sure why it matters “when” a person comes to your website? It’s super important! Knowing the peek months of performance of your website can help you build marketing campaigns for those specific time periods. You can run specials on your website or, if there aren’t as many visitors as you’d like, develop a marketing campaign to bring them to your website to try and ramp up website traffic.
Not sure you are targeting the right demographic locations or are considering adding more? In the Audience Overview you can see demographic information all the way down to what city a user is visiting you from. From there, you can take that data and develop location-specific pages targeting those locations, allowing you to have the possibility to show up in google searches for keywords that people are searching for the products or services you offer.
What my website viewer’s ages?
Surprisingly, you can gather age and gender demographic data through Google Analytics! This is also an important marketing tool for your company just as much as location. How so? Well, if you are running a marketing campaign at local bars with college student and you find out that the people most interested in your product or service are people in their 30s and 40s, then it might be time to reconsider your marketing approach to promote your business in an area where you can reach this target if they are logged into their Google Accounts. This can be found in the audience section under “demographics”
Are they new or are they coming back?
Not sure that people are coming to your website? Concerned that your current marketing strategies are going stale? You can take a look at “New Visitor” and “Returning Visitor” data on the Audience Overview section of Analytics as well! This data will help you understand if you are still able to reach a new audience or if your website traffic only your current consumers coming back again.
How did they find me?
This is a question that it is really important to know the answer to. From this data you can see if your Google AdWords campaign is beneficial, if your Facebook strategy is not worth the money, or if your Google rankings alone hold all the power for your website visits from your customers or potential clients. Want to know where to find this data? Start by finding the “Acquisition” tab in your Google Analytics accounts. Once you click that you’ll get an overview. That overview will give you an idea of what website visitors came directly to your website, if they found you in an organic Google search, if you were found socially, or if they were referred to you by a link of yours on another website. Knowing this data might point you in the right direction on whether you should spend your time focusing on an on-site search engine optimization strategy , if your efforts would be better spent building a social media presence to pull people in, or if an AdWords campaign might be the way to go.
What are they searching for?
If people are coming to your website directly, you might be interested in where exactly those website visitors are coming from. To find out that data, go to your acquisition overview and click “direct” . On there, you’ll see a list of terms that people search to discover you. For example, if you are being found for “Website Marketing” and you don’t have a page built for that, it probably makes sense for you to build a custom page for people to be directed to when making that search.
What is your top content?
Interested in finding out what parts of your website are the most frequently visited? Go to behavior > all pages. From there you can see what are your top ranked pages that are visited most regularly. From there you might decide to custom build out that page or maybe delete pages entirely to make room for more items on your main menu of higher importance.
What are your worst performing pages?
Just like with your “most frequently” visited pages, having data on your worst performing pages is beneficial as well. From this you might find out that you need to move that page’s specific location, make content edits on that page, or delete the page all together.
Hope this quick breakdown of Google Analytics helps your learn some insight on next steps for your website. If you need any additional help deciphering your search traffic, feel free to reach out to us! We’re always happy to help our customers learn and grow in their digital marketing strategies.