10 Brilliant Ways Google Business Analytics Can Improve Your Business
The latest estimates show the number of companies using Google Analytics to range from 30 to 50 million companies. You need to be one of them.
Because these companies successfully use Google Business Analytics to grow their sales, grow their customer base, grow their market share. Basically, it’s a lot of growth.
As a small business owner, a solopreneur, or a freelancer, you can either grow and improve or wither away and die.
In the interest of not dying, check out these 10 brilliant ways you can use Google Analytics to not only improve your business but make it flourish.
1. The ‘Why-Your-Customers-Are-Running-Away’ Rate
More commonly known as the bounce rate, it is an essential key to figuring out where exactly are your customers leaving your website.
Once you see a big percentage of visitors leaving your website after seeing a specific page, then it’s an indicator that there is an issue with this page.
Delve deeper into the page’s specifics. Is it the static visuals? Then a video or an animated piece might fix the problem.
Aiming for higher optimisation on that one page will hike up the duration your visitors stay on your site and lead to higher conversions.
Google Website Optimiser can be a great help in figuring out the kinks and fixing them.
2. If You Got It, Flaunt It
This is the reverse of the bounce rate.
By reviewing traffic levels and sources (which we’ll get to in a minute), you can identify which pages your visitors are spending a respectable chunk of time on.
After figuring out your “winner” pages, milk them for all their worth. You can leverage these pages by making sure they’re not buried deep into your website.
In addition, you can find which parts of these pages are hooking your visitors and repeat them in other not-so-great pages. This technique helps with maximising your conversions and taking your business to a new level.
3. Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?
Having the traffic insights of your visitors’ origin points can help immensely with increasing your visitor’s flow.
You can find out whether the traffic is mainly originating from paid ads or organic content. If the higher percentage is coming from the organic content, then kudos to you!
If not, then you know that your paid targeting is working well but your organic content needs a boost.
4. Team Desktop or Team Mobile?
After identifying your traffic pattern, figuring out the source of the traffic is the common next step.
Regardless of whether you’re a solopreneur, a small business owner, or a freelancer, mobile optimisation should rank pretty high on your list of priorities.
Google Analytics lets you know whether the majority of your traffic is coming from a mobile device or a desktop.
So if you’re seeing a high bounce rate for your mobile users, then your first order of business is making your website as mobile-friendly and accessible as you can.
5. Follow Your Visitor Around (in a Non-Creepy Way)
So you figured out where your visitors are coming from and what makes them flee your website in tears. Now it’s time to analyse their behaviour.
Google Business Analytics has a “user flow” feature that showcases the areas your visitors flock to in droves, and their routes from one page to another.
6. Are There New Markets on Your Horizon?
Since you’re gaining a thorough understanding of your traffic patterns, you can start recognising the geographic significance of your traffic flow and pin down potential markets.
The trick to growing your business lies in identifying new markets, thus increasing your customer base.
For example, you have a segment of visitors that originate from Australia, whose traffic and conversion rates match other visitors who originate from Southeast Asia.
You can take a closer look at this small segment and work on providing content that matches their interests, which will — in turn- grow that segment, helping you tap into a new market.
7. Keywords Are Key
Now that you have solid traffic, you need to work on maintaining and boosting it. This is where Google Business Analytics and the Google Search Console comes in.
It can provide a full breakdown of the most effective keywords and queries resulting higher incoming flow of visitors.
After surveying your keywords, choosing the right ones and embedding them in your URLs can bump your visibility on Google’s search engine.
Google Search Console, once activated, can bring in supporting data that would narrow down your problem areas.
8. Does Father Google Love You?
Speaking of ranks, how high you rank can make or break your traffic flow.
After narrowing your on-fire keywords, you need to set them up for successful ranking.
Check which page of Google’s search are you ranking, then aim for page one by enabling search engine optimisation and revamping your SEO strategy.
Another option would be utilising Google AdWords by starting a pay per click campaign with your keywords as the focus point.
9. How’s the Competition Doing?
It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the competition. Google Analytics can provide well-rounded insights about what your competition is getting right (or wrong).
By taking a look at the benchmarking screen, you can compare a variety of statistics against your competitors.
These benchmarks compare stats like traffic flow and average time on site, in order for you to see your performance stacked up against your competitors’ numbers.
10. Google Business Analytics: The Reports Edition
If you are one of those people who dread doing reports, you’d be glad to hear that Google Business Analytics is here to save you.
It’s an in-built report’s heaven, showcasing all the stats and figures you need to know for turbocharging your business growth.
After going through all the data and perks you can have for your business, this section is all about how to use Google Analytics.
Channels Report
This report is all about traffic. It divides up all your incoming visitors into a variety of sections. The main ones are:
- Direct
- Social
- Paid Search
- Organic Search
- Referral
The direct section picks up people who directly typed your website into their browser, while organic search goes for others who looked for your website through a search engine.
Paid search is all about your Google Ads and the people who land on your site by clicking them, whilst the referral tab goes for visitors who are referred to your site from another website.
The social tab relates to the visitors who make it to your page through your own social media channels, and the email is through email marketing.
Sounds about right, yes?
Now if you want to delve into deeper insights, you can do so by clicking any of those sections.
For example, you can check if your visitors are more Facebook or Instagram-based by going through the social tab.
All Pages Report
Remember us telling you to identify which of your pages are killing it?
The “All Pages” report can be of great help.
This report ranks your most popular pages. Traditionally, your homepage is right up top. However, sometimes another page would take over first place if a piece of content goes viral.
In order to capitalise on your visitor growth, make sure to check this reports regularly.
Search Query Report
It does exactly what it says it does. The search query report will identify which search words visitors are using to find your website.
This report can be invaluable in nailing down effective keywords as well as ineffective ones, in addition to finding your ranking for each keyword you have assigned.
Social Channels Report
This is the queen of reports.
As a small business owner or freelancer, you already know the importance of effectively using your social media presence to redirect traffic to your website (and thus, your services).
The social channels report delves into how well (or unwell) your social media accounts are performing.
The beauty of this report is centralising all the information you need in one place, so you wouldn’t get lost trying to integrate all your data in one place.
By clicking on separate sections (like Facebook or Pinterest), you can find out which posts are achieving higher traffic numbers.
This will give you solid insights on how to manage your social media presence and help you recognise the type of popular content that your customers want to see.
Brace Yourselves: Traffic Is Coming
Are you ready?
We know you’re currently dealing with an overflow of information. However, once you apply these 10 ways of using Google Business Analytics, you’ll start seeing an increase in your website’s traffic leading to measurable business growth.
You can’t afford to sit on your lapels though, because improving your business is a process of continuous effort.
So make sure to learn more about improving your sales conversion rates, setting up killer campaigns, and all things marketing.
GET THE FREE GUIDE: 10 Google Analytics Performance Metrics You Can Use To Optimise & Grow Your Business Online.
Strategic Optimisation + Growth consultant for lean start-ups and change-making entrepreneurs enabling them to grow their business in a sustainable and profitable way. My super-powers are business optimisation, CX, SEO, and leveraging data insights for business growth. #fuelledbycoffee
Originally published at optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on December 2, 2018.
