Google Analytics – Quick Tip for Beleaguered Marketing Managers

Google Analytics can be a little bit overwhelming. Ok, by a ‘little‘ I mean a lot. In fact, it always reminds me of this scene from the classic comedy Airplane (hence the picture above!).

The issue with Google Analytics is that the default dashboards contain soooo much information that it’s hard to see the wood for the trees. This is one of the reasons we do a lot of managed analytics for clients as well as in-house training for companies in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Help! Show me something meaningful!

If you’ve not looked at Google Analytics for ages then try this…

Change the date range to a year (this is helpful as we get to focus on a bigger pool of visitors)

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…then go to the “All Pages” report which is under “Site Content” on the “Behavior” left hand navigation bar.

Screen Shot 2016-07-22 at 15.15.31

On the right hand side you’ll then see information which is all about which pages on your website have received the most views over the year.

Specifically, you probably want to look at the Excel like table, lower down the screen, which lists out the most popular pages – this is really where the action is happening.

For many people the top entry in this table will be “/”, this slash is simply shorthand for your homepage.  Pause & take a moment to consider the amount of people who have visited that page (and you can see the number in table) and think to yourself “How well did the homepage serve the needs of those people?” and, more importantly, “How could I improve my homepage so that it better serves my target website visitors? How can I make it easier for them to complete the goals that they (& I) want?“.

What changes can you make to help that traffic convert anonymous website visitors into paying customers?

Use that table as your starting point in planning where to work on your website.

More tips coming.

Joel

p.s. you can also look at “Landing Pages” as well. The difference here is that, whilst ‘All Pages‘ shows the most popular pages, ‘LandingPages‘ is specifically referring to the pages where the website visitor began their journey – the page they started on.  And, remember, that’s not always the homepage.

p.p.s the more you get into Analytics, the more you’ll discover that we don’t really like to make decisions on this aggregate traffic of all your website visitors; not all visitors are equal, so smart analytics helps us slice & dice our data to focus on the more lucrative segments of your traffic – but that’s for another blog post.

 

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