If you are running an online business, chances are that you are looking for a way to continuously improve the performance of your pages and your conversions. While there are several great online tools that will allow you to check your statistics, the truth is that you can do it all using Google’s analytics features and your blogging platform’s own statistics.
If you don’t yet have Google analytics on your site then head over to my post for a step by step guide for installing it. If you have, then below you will find a list of the best website statistics you should monitor regularly.
Traffic Volume and Conversions
If you want to get more sales from your site, you need to determine your conversion rates. For this, you need to calculate the traffic volume. Pay attention to the number of page visits and number of actual visitors, as some of the people would browse through various pages during one visit. This is a very obvious analytic which is shown on your home page in Google analytics as users and sessions.
At the same time, you will have to calculate the conversions of your sales funnel and then you can work out how you can improve your offers to get more sales with less traffic.
Geo Location
If you run a local business, chances are that traffic coming from abroad, or even different continents will not convert into subscribers, leads, or sales. You will have to initially determine your Geo location and monitor your traffic sources, Take a read of my post on Local SEO to help you set this up properly.
If you decide to sign up for traffic generation offers or pay per click advertising, make sure that you are not paying for useless or bot visitors. My post on PPC will help you get this right. Once you know where your visitors are located, you can target the right demographics. Again the home page of Google analytics will show you your visitors location.
Demographics
When creating content, you need to know who you are talking to. Your website demographic statistics will help you determine your audience and tailor your posts to their needs. Your job as a website developer and owner is to keep the site exciting and capture leads by getting people excited about what you have to offer.
Finding the demographics of your audience needs you to delve deeper than the home page of google analytics. Go to audience on the right and the overview will give you the information you need. You can delve even further with the other options to see even what city your visitors are from.
Bounce Rate
Not many website owners know about the importance of this important statistic. Simply said, a bounce rate will tell you how many percent of your visitors have left your site after landing on one of your pages. It means they did not explore your site any further than the original post.
There might be several reasons for a high bounce rate; you might have an issue with your site speed, performance, fonts, or responsive features, maybe even the design. It is recommended that you carry out a Speedcheck and find out whether or not those with slower internet can load your pages easily.
If you have ruled speed out as a reason then it’s time to look at what you are offering the reader. Make sure you have internal links in your posts that point to other related posts that they might find useful.
Google does take your bounce rate into consideration when ranking your site, which is a shame because maybe your one post answered all of their questions but you will never know unless they bother to leave a comment and let’s face it how many people actually bother to do that?
If your bounce rate is high try to entice the readers to look further into your site… sometimes holding stuff back if there’s a post on your site that covers the subject already.
Most Popular Posts
If you want to tailor your content to the needs of your audience, you need to monitor the performance of the individual pages. You can see on your Google analytics which pages people land on and which ones make them leave immediately. You can also monitor your graphic and video content performance, so you can post more about what people are interested in, Check your traffic sources and the structure of your most popular content and then change your less engaging content to keep your visitors longer.
Final Thoughts
If you want to improve the performance of your site, you will need to make sure that you keep an eye on your statistics, SEO ranking, and customer behavior, so you can learn to speak the language of your audience.
These are just the best website statistics you should monitor but the more you play around with the options in Google analytics then the more you will learn and the more you will improve your website and make more sales.
I hope you have found this post useful and helped to give you some ideas on how Google analytics can help you to grow. If you have please give it a share on your favourite social media platform.
As ever if you have any questions or just want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment below and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
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