How to Use Google Analytics to Know Your Website Visitors

How to Use Google Analytics to Know Your Website Visitors

Do you want to know more about your website visitors? Sure you do! In order to thrive (heck, even survive), businesses must understand customer needs, wants, habits and behaviors. One way to learn more about prospects and customers is to study the data that is captured as they browse and shop on your website. There is a wealth of information found right within analytics tools like Google Analytics that can be used to refine your strategy – the key is learning where to look for it.

Read on to learn how analytics can help you understand your website visitors better!

1. Who are your website visitors?

Learning more about your website’s visitors is a surefire way to refine your marketing strategy and create meaningful audience segments. When you track the data aggregated as people explore your website, you eliminate the guesswork when it comes to figuring out what campaigns are or are not working.

The first place to look when trying to get know your website’s visitors is the Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, you will find data that includes: age, gender, language, location, browsing device and operating system, affinities, in-market interests and more. Use this data to create hyper-targeted ads and personalized customer experiences that cater to your audience.

2. How do people find your website?

By looking at Customer Acquisition data, you can find out how people get to your website, and which of your efforts drive the most traffic. There are six different sources that can contribute to your website traffic:

Direct Traffic – Users type your URL into the Web Address Bar. These are the visitors most familiar with your brand, such as current or past customers, or those already in your sales pipeline. Be sure you’re keeping an eye on this data for brand awareness insights.

Organic Search – Users find your site through typing keywords into a search engine. These visitors type a keyword that is related to your business in a search engine, then click a link to your site when it appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Analyzing this data is a good way to evaluate your SEO efforts.

Email – Users click on a link within an email sent to them. Chances are you have an email marketing campaign, in which you’re most likely including links to your website. Tracking this traffic source will tell you how compelling or targeted your emails are and identify any gaps in the campaigns.

Referral Traffic – Users click on a link to your site from another website. Link-building, guest-blogging and strategic partnerships are all ways to increase this traffic source.

Social Media Traffic – Users click on a link found on a social media profile/platform. This data is extremely helpful when evaluating which platforms are worth the time, effort and ad spend.

Advertisement Traffic – Users click on a link found on a paid ad. This data allows you to track the website traffic generated by your PPC ads, and helps you determine if the ad spend is generating enough ROI.

3. What does engagement with your brand look like?
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Once a visitor submits a form or makes a purchase on your site, you gain an even greater idea of their specific interactions on your website from that point forward. From here, you can see what pages interest them most, and use this information to target your content and experiences in ways that they will find more specific and relevant to them based on their purchase history and clickstream behavior. Customer Engagement analytics provide vital insight and allow you to look at browsing behavior such as: new and returning visitors, pageviews, top pages, session duration, bounce rate, user-behavior flow, lead score and customer profiles.

4. What drives conversions for your business?

When it comes to customer conversion, content can be the make or break piece of your sales pipeline. A Conversion can include any desired action that is trackable throughout the duration of a user’s visit to your site. This may be a form submission, sharing your content, downloading an eBook or whitepaper, visiting a specific URL/page, spending a certain amount of time on your page or making a purchase of one of your products.

Additionally, goals can be set to track the number of visitors converting to customers. Make sure that your organization has a clear vision of what a website visit’s desired outcome is, and then set up goals in Google Analytics to track these events and evaluate your success.

5. What makes people come back for more?

Retaining a customer costs far less than trying to acquire a new one. In fact, according to Gartner Group, 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers and according to Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

Some marketing automation tools enable you to track customer retention variables and eCommerce events to help you build a better understanding of your customers and work towards better serving them. Want to dive deeper into website analytics and really get to know your website visitors? Download the white paper and get started today!