Google Analytics for the Alexis Majied website

Google Analytics is pretty much the analytics tool for everyone – from the person who is just starting to examine web data to the expert who’s been doing it for awhile. And it’s no wonder.  So much information is available to report on, all for free.

I recently added GA to this website. After having it on this site for almost two weeks, I believe now would be a great time to take a look at what information and insights GA can offer me.

Immediately upon arriving at the GA homepage, there is a dashboard that offers analytical information at a glance. At the top, there’s an overview on the number of visitors that have come to my site. A graph is used to display the number of visitors according to hour, day, week or month. From the day view, I see that I had one visitor on Nov. 12, two visitors on Nov. 17 and one visitor on Nov. 23. Beneath that, I see a breakdown of data regarding my visitors’ visits. I see that, although there seemed to be four visitors, that there were actually three. One person visited twice. The four visits resulted in a total of seven pageviews, an average of 1.75 pages per visit, an average visit duration of 12 seconds and a 75 percent bounce rate.

At the very bottom of the page, there are three categories: demographics, system and mobile. For my set of analytics, there was no data to view for system or mobile. As for graphics, I was able to learn that 100 percent of my visitors spoke English and were located in the United States. I also learned that two visits originated from Blue Springs, one from Norfolk and one from Morgantown. 

This dashboard is helpful because it tells you virtually everything you need to know about your visitors at a glance. Of course, if you want to know more, you can certainly start digging. As did I…

On the left side of the page, there are several reports to click on that allow you to delve deeper into your audience. The first is Audience. This report is the exact same report that appears on the dashboard. Demographics and Interests reports are also available. Although I have not enabled these features, I plan to do so in the future. Demographics breaks down your audience by age and gender and Interests tells you what hobbies your visitors are interested in.  The information compiled in these reports will be useful, especially from a marketing standpoint, because of the following reasons as outlined by Google themselves:

·         They allow you to better understand who your visitors are

·         You can segment data by these same  characteristics so you can understand the differences between your converting and non-converting visitors

·         These are the same demographic and interest categories used to target ads on the Google Display Network, so you can use these insights to refine campaign strategies

Also under the Audience category is a report called “Mobile.”  This report tells you what devices your visitors are using to visit your site. For my site, all four visits were from a desktop computer. This report is important because if more of my visitors were using a mobile device, that might be a red flag for me to look into some responsive design or to build a mobile site to accommodate those visitors.

The last report under Audience that I find useful is “Visitors Flow.” This report provides a snapshot of a visitor’s every move while on my site from the time they arrived until the time they exited. One visitor, who has had two separate visits, started off at my homepage, then navigated to the page entitled, “Google Adwords vs Facebook Ads” and then to the page entitled, “Which is king: Content vs Conversation” where they finally dropped off. This is helpful because it provides insight into what my visitors are looking for on my site and, quite possibly, what they’re not looking for on my site. I can make tweaks to my site based on this information in an effort to optimize each visitor’s visit to my site.

The Acquisition section is pretty useful as well. The “All Traffic” page tells you where your traffic originated. For me, one person arrived via referral from blogger.com. Another person arrived by typing in my URL directly and the last person arrived by a referral from some other unspecified location. This information is helpful because it helps me understand how people arrive at my site. If my site was listed on some other website, I would want to know under what pretenses my site is listed and ensure that the information about my site is accurate and representing me and my brand in the best possible way.

But I see the Acquisition section being especially important when and if I ever launch an advertising campaign. This section describes the number of visits, percentage of new visits, number of new visits, the bounce rate, the number of pages viewed per visit, the average visit duration, the percentage of the goal conversion rate achieved, percent of goal completions and the goal value in a dollar amount. This pretty much tells you if your campaign is a success. It also provides insight on the keywords you use and breaks them down by paid and organic search keywords. I like this because if I ever began a search engine optimization or marketing campaign, I can see how well my keywords are or are not performing.

I think Google Analytics is a great tool. I compared the findings of GA and compared them to those of blogger.com’s and I feel Google’s analytical data is more reliable. For example, blogger.com is reporting that I have had 171 pageviews since my site began, but shows no visits to my site on Nov. 12, Nov. 17 or Nov. 23. It is showing that the visitors I had on other days were mostly referred by a site called vampirestat.com, a domain appraisal service.

Based on the information provided by GA, I truly believe this tool would help me optimize my site for better visitor totals and campaign performance.