First and foremost, for those of you who are not familiar with Google Analytics its a wonderful little tool that allows you to analyze the traffic that’s visiting your website. It’s got graphs of all shapes and sizes and gives you an endless stream of data for you to in turn take and better your website.
Default Google Analytics screen
Most people that use Google Analytics are quite used to seeing this screen:
This is a basic “who’s been to my site and how long did they stay” screen. Which is a great resource, but I was surprised to learn that most people that use GA don’t completely understand what this tool is capable of and how to take the information given to better serve your customer base… which is why the tool is so great in the first place. The majority of people use GA as a glorified page counter, which is really a waste of a great free resource given to us by the all mighty Google.
So what else can you do?…
You can practically break your visitors down to what kind of underwear they prefer.
Inside of the visitors drop down, you’ll discover all the information you’ll ever need to know about who’s coming to your website. You can see what operating systems are being used, what screen resolutions, what ISPs, what browsers, and the list goes on and on.
So what can you do with all of that nifty information? Well for starters you can make sure that you’re catering to the largest of those particular groups. If more people view your website in 1024×768 resolution then you better make damn sure that your website looks good on their screen. Or if you’ve got most of your traffic from people with low speed internet connections then I suggest you’d better drop all the flash graphics. Which by the way you should do that anyway because there’s nothing worse than going to someone’s web page and having to sit through a 2 minute short movie about how great they are before being able to do what ever it is you came to that page to do.
Look at the Content section to find out where your visitors are spending most of their time.
Inside the content tab you’ll find detailed information on what pages of your website are attracting the most attention from your viewers. If your “Frequently Asked Questions” page is receiving a great deal more attention than your sales page you should probably incorporate some easy ways to buy from that page. You should also hire a new copy writer if your FAQ page is more fun to read than your sales page.
Use Site Overlay!
This feature shows you exactly on the page where your visitors are clicking. This is a great tool to test your offer names, article names, future kids names, etc.. If you see that very few viewers are interested in a specific offer you can change that offer until it gets the attention that it really deserves.
Taking the time to explore and learn the functions of Google Analytics will help you better understand your internet visitors and, in turn, better serve them. Now a days, internet marketing is all about traffic, traffic, and more traffic… But all that traffic is in vein of your message falls on deaf ears.
