6 Methods to use Google Analytics to understand your site’s traffic

One of the crucial variables every website owner should pay close attention to is site’s traffic. After all, websites are primarily created to be visited by web users. It is very important to understand how these web users constituting your site’s traffic behave. It is the understanding of your visitor’s behavior that will serve as blueprint for devising new plans that actually work.

Thanks to technology, you don’t have to work like a clock to monitor and understand your site’s traffic. Working with Google analytics will greatly help you to understand it perfectly. How can you make use of this web tool to achieve your goal? We’ll be checking out six methods on how to use Google analytics to understand your site’s traffic. Shall we?

1. Crunch the numbers

With Google analytics, you can know the exact number of visitors revisiting your website or visiting it for the very first time. If you have an engaging and SEO-optimized content, it can draw visitors to your site after visiting it before.

To know web visitors that’s visiting your site repeatedly for a period of time, check under “Frequency and Recency”. You can also check out the pages that visitors visit the most. This will help you to know what an average visitor is looking for on your site.

The information you get will help you to provide people contents that suit their preference and interest. Contents with lesser visitations can be remodelled to your visitor’s preferential taste.

2.  Check the engagement rate

Using Google analytics will help you to know the duration spent on your site by visitors. It also shows you the precise content that’s attracting your visitors the most. It is very important you note that Google has a specific way of measuring engagement. It is only the movement of visitors from one page to another that Google measures as an engagement.

Checking on your engagement levels regularly is very vital. It’ll help you to know if your contents are interesting, useful and relevant, or the otherwise. It’ll also let you to know where necessary adjustment need to be made.

3. Know your average pages per visit

In understanding your site’s traffic, it’s essential that you know the number of pages clicked on by your visitors before leaving your site. If the turnout is low, you can include call-to-action buttons on your site. Alternatively, you can insert links  to other pages within a particular page’s content. Also, you can add previous or related contents at the bottom side of your site to make visitors visit other pages.

However, if the number of pages clicked is high, then that shows your engagement rate value has been increased, which is a good thing for your site.

Furthermore, you can also track the amount of time spent by visitors on each page on your site. Pages holding visitors’ attention for quite a sometime are apparently better than pages that can’t sustain visitors’ interest for more than two seconds.

Drawing comparison between engaging posts and unengaging ones will help you to deduce the real vibe in your contents that attracts visitors to your site.

4. Taking note of your bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to the rate at which visitors get to your site and “bounce” back without even taking any moment to check your contents or posts. Obviously, visitors won’t be bouncing away from your site without something being wrong somewhere.

There are several factors that directly or indirectly contribute to increment in bounce rate. It could be caused by unappealing homepage, no recent posts, puzzling layout or poor website design. These factors, as well as several others, are strong enough to make visitors leave your site in less than a chest beat.

Seeing visitors bouncing away is no joy for any website owner. To beat down bounce rate on your site,  try to make your homepage more attractive. Nobody likes something dull and unprofessional. As opined by Brendan Wilde, Marketing Manager at Umbrella, you should use a fast-loading hosting service for your website. Also, you should try adding more topical contents with eye-turning titles.

5. Count the number of email conversions

Converting a visitor to a customer is the biggest win and joy of good website owner. That shows the website met the expectations of a visitor. It is important you know the number of your conversion.

As a matter of fact, if you have a very high number of conversion, your contents will be geared towards satisfying the need of these your loyal converts. So, it’s very vital you can account for their number.

The best way to do this is to check the number of subscribers that visited your website through your email links.  By doing this, you’ll know whether email marketing is a good strategy for you or not. It’ll also let you know where you should improve in order to attract more subscribers.

You can also use Google Analytics to  check which browsers, operating systems and Internet service providers used by majority of your visitors to visit your website. Click “Technology Reports” to do this. To know whether your visitors are using computers or mobile devices, click “Mobile Overview” category.

6. Flick through location and language

You can use Google analytics to know the location and even the language of your visitors.  This Google analytics function will particularly help if your contents are meant for a targeted audience.

Knowing the location of your visitors can be used to your advantage. The information can help you to develop useful contents that’ll meet the taste of your targeted audience. For instance, if the bulk of your visitors are from France, you can begin to chip in a bit of French news and researches. Doing this will further enhance the interest of these visitors from France, who form the majority of your site’s traffic.

Google Analytics is a superb web tool you can use to provide better content for web visitors, especially targeted audience. The list of the wonderful functions of this web tool cannot be exhausted. But the methods given here are a good way to get started.