4 Burning Questions About Google Analytics For Beginners And How To Address Them
So you have setup your Google Analytics (GA) and understand the meaning of basic
Google Analytics metrics such as Conversion Rates, Bounce Rates, Sessions, New
Users. Now comes the hard part: What do these data mean? This lesson, I am going
to walk you through 5 most common questions and frustrations that new GA users
face about GA data and how to solve them:
1. Why did my Traffic Change Dramatically?
Users who use auto alert tools such as a Google Analytics chatbot would sometimes
get push notifications about a sudden drop in their traffic.
Typically, there will be different sources sending traffic to your site at any given time.
Firstly, lets see where the traffic increase or decrease has occurred on your GA
dashboard.
We can then break down “All Sessions” into different sources. In this case, there are
“Direct Traffic”, “Non-paid Search Traffic”, “Paid Search Traffic”, “Referral Traffic”.
As we can see, the traffic decrease was caused by a drop in “Paid Search Traffic.” All
other sources remained pretty much the same. Given this data, lets dig a little bit
deeper. Why did we have a decrease in paid visitors? Did we change anything with
our Marketing Campaign and Marketing Budgets? If we increase paid budget or lower
our Cost Per Click (CPC), we would expect to see a general increase in traffic.
2. Are My Traffic Good Traffic?
Increased in traffic may not always be a good thing. If your traffic has increased or
decreased significantly, it is always important to dig deeper. You can begin looking at
data such as location of visitors. For example, go to Acquisition “Geo” Location. When
you set your data range, you can choose to compare with the previous year.
We see in this case that the decrease in traffic was caused by a reduction in visitors
from India. If these visitors are not your target market, then decrease in traffic should
not affect your business.
3. How Do I Know If My Blog Is Converting Traffic?
Blogs nowadays need ROI and businesses consider blog as an integral part of your
digital marketing strategy. For Blog analytics, there are two key metrics to look at:
traffic generated by the blog and conversions generated by the blog. If you have
conversion tracking in place, you can find this information in GA by selecting:
Behavior “Site Content” Landing Pages.
Blog “Awesome 1” is doing the best because its number of new users and goal
completion are the highest compared to other blogs. Paying attention on new users
and goal completion are a good way of tracking and evaluating your blog
performance.
4. How to track my SEO with Google Analytics?
All SEO strategies trace back to conversions. Whether it is improving rankings or
increasing traffic, the goal is almost always more conversions. Conversions are
Google Analytics’ specialty. To make conversions work, make sure that conversions
are linked to thank you pages. These thank you pages can then be tracked as goals in
GA. You can add your goals by visiting Admin “Goals” and then selecting New Goal.
Name your goal and select “Destination”.
Enter the URL and choose to associate a value with a goal if you would like GA to
track value.
Click create goal and you are done. You can view your goals by visiting Conversions
“Goals” Overview.
Conversions are much more useful than just looking at traffic. Traffic can be down but
if conversions are up year over year, then your SEO and business must have
improved.
Conclusion:
A lot of people see changes on their GA and are thinking to themselves, “What
happened and Why did this happen?”. Sometimes it is important to see the reasons
behind changes in data. Diving deeper into GA and you will find valuable insights to
maximize your conversions and improve your website and business.