Google Analytics – the ultimate tool for your website’s success

If you own a website, you have probably heard about Google Analytics at least once before. This is a very important tool not just for advertisers but also for web owners like you as it is very effective in monitoring and analyzing traffic that you attract to your website. Personally, I find Google Analytics very useful and use it not only on my own site, but also on all clients’ websites that take on an SEO campaign here at Ignition Media. It helps me identify where visitors are coming from and how long they stay on a website. As a professional SEO company, we rely on Google Analytics and other SEO tools to help clients like you understand how your website performs in terms of traffic generation. The information you get from this tool will help you figure out what elements that need some adjusting, what pages need to be improved, what keywords to target, etc. By doing so, you can device action plans on how you can make your website perform better on search page results. Remember, every website owner’s goal is to appear on the first page of SERPs as this would mean increasing your traffic by as much as 500%.

What exactly is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics, which was officially offered to the public by Google in August 2006, offers you a user-friendly web and mobile analytic solutions designed to help decision-makers the list of elements they need to improve the overall performance and ROI of their online marketing initiatives. It is designed to track traffic patterns on your website. The free program is fully integrated with Adwords and Adsense and offers series of reports to help you understand your visitors’ online behavior.

Guide to Google Analytics

First-time website owners need to understand that a website’s design and content alone are not enough to perform well in the online arena. When you launch your website, you would want to get feedback on how your website is received by your target audience. Did they find your homepage attractive? Were they encouraged to click on other pages? Did they find your content interesting that they stayed for more than just a couple of minutes? Did they sign up to your newsletters or participate in your survey? Did they like your page on Facebook or followed you on Twitter? These are the typical questions that you need to find answers for to know if your website is effective in reaching out the right audience. Instead of asking each visitor about their insights, using tools like Google Analytics can give you all the information that you’re looking for in a user-friendly interface in a flash. For more information, be sure to read a previous article of mine ‘How to Measure a Website’s Traffic (Google Analytics)’.

Ready to Ignite Your Website?

Getting Started

Getting started with Google Analytics is a piece of cake. Just sign up for an account, set up account properties, and set up your tracking code and you’ll be able to track activities in your website in the next 24 hours by accessing Visitors Overview screen. Some of my clients actually don’t have the time to sign up and configure Google Analytics on their website. Don’t worry as we can do this for you. With years of expertise and experience, we can make this happen in no time.

Anyway, at the top part of the report, you’ll find a chart that contains the traffic patterns for the whole month. There is a dropdown that you can use to view specific date. Google Analytics allows you to make annotations for specific days. For instance, if you run a marketing campaign where you’ve given out free ebooks on particular days or your website was mentioned in a popular blog, etc. This way, when you look back, you’ll know the elements that caused the spike.

Personally, I find this feature very useful. When my clients are looking for ways on how they can pull up their numbers, I help them go back to these annotations and together, we can immediately identify what needs to be done to get the visitors back.

So let’s take a look at the most useful tools Google Analytics has to offer;

Visitors Overview

This is the most important feature of Google Analytics. This provides you that much-needed report for your site. It tells you the exact number of visitors that checked out your website every day, every week, and every month. It also list the number of unique visitors, page views, and the average time they spent on your website. In addition, it includes the pages they checked out, the bounce rate, and the percentage of new visits. Looking at this report, you can tell right away how effective your website is through the eyes of your visitors. You’ll know that something must be done if your traffic is consistently going down, if your visitors do not click on your links, and if they stay on your website for less than one minute.

Visitors Behavior

Reports on visitors’ behavior is the most important marketing-wise. This section gives you detailed information about your new and returning visitors. Those people who visit your website on a regular basis are considered your loyal followers. These are the people that you can rely on when promoting new products or when you’re trying to get word out about your company or your services. You know that your website is performing really well in terms of traffic generation and user engagement when the number of your loyal visitors is steadily growing.

The reports also provide you with page depth and visit duration. You would want your visitors to stay as longer as possible to your website. Each minute that they do, you have higher chances of getting them to respond to your call to action. You also want these people to check out as many pages on your website as possible. People who view more than just a couple pages are more engaged and can easily be converted from typical visitors to loyal followers.

Traffic Sources

After building your website and after launching it in the World Wide Web, the next thing that you usually focus on is traffic-generation. It doesn’t matter how professional your website looks or how impressive your content is, if very few people visit your website, there is no way that you’ll sell and make a profit. Google Analytics help you identify traffic sources so you’ll know where to focus your effort on. This also helps you figure out the strength of your SEO campaign. Are you incoming links working for you? Is your target audience clicking your Pay per Click Ads? Are you attracting enough organic traffic? Personally, I would recommend NOT focusing on just one source alone. You would want to diversify as much as possible so you can always have direct control on your traffic-generation efforts. Some people who have focused too much on SEO suffered heavily when Google changed its algorithms. They saw their website went down from top spots and they’ve lost enormous traffic along the way. To prevent that from happening, make sure to attract traffic using all possible sources.

As part of Ignition Media services, I offer tried-and-test traffic generation services designed to help you boost your traffic from all possible sources. As a website owner myself, I understand how important it is to any business to have regular visitors to their website.

Content

As they say, content is king when it comes to online marketing. Google Analytics helps you figure out if your content is really effective. On the content overview page, you’ll find how many times a certain page within your website is viewed and how long a visitor stayed in that particular page. Here at Ignition Media, we understand how important content is when it comes to conversion rate that is why we offer superb copywriting services. I make sure to provide each client with attention-grabbing, high quality, and very interesting content to help them make sure that their visitors stay a little longer. Through this, I help you establish your expertise in your niche and as a result, you’ll find it easier to get your visitors to trust you.

Trust Ignition Media as your Gold Coast SEO manager

Ignition Media is deeply committed in helping both small and huge businesses on the Gold Coast, and around Australia realise their online presence. Aside from website creation and design, I also offer highly efficient Search Engine Optimisation services. Using tools just like Google Analytics and by applying my expertise in SEO, I have helped hundreds of Gold Coast websites realise their best chances of ranking on major search engines.

Ignition Media is a leading Gold Coast website design and SEO company offering a complete range of website design, website development, search engine optimisation, and social marketing. So, if you find yourself in need of a website, regardless if you’re representing a start-up business or a multi-million corporation, you can be assured that Ignition Media covers your needs from A to Z. From custom WordPress websites to email newsletters to Facebook business pages, you can bet that you can count on our years of expertise and proven track record. For enquiries, please call me at 07 5568 7515 or email me at [email protected]. I will be more than happy to assist you.

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