Analytics, it all sounds rather easy, but where do you start? Everyone should always be testing. But you need to start with the idea of a scent, and grow from there. Let’s take a look. Summit online marketing our Liverpool based SEO company, has always tried to provide tips for our readers. Read this post for some basic Analytics help.
Tip Focus on the high traffic areas with big revenue potentials: landing pages, site overall, internal site search pages, and leaky funnels.
How do you know if the page is actually broken, or the keywords?
Lets start with a metaphor: Imagine a map of Liverpool. Now you’ve just been hired you to minimise traffic accidents in the city. What will you do first? Look for: where is most of the traffic? Where are the most accidents occurring? Do we have wrong or no street signs? Seasonality issues like rain or snow? Timing: any events going on at the Echo arena?
It also helps to know your website. Maybe you want to watch a friend click about, and navigate through your site.
I know from experience that when you start going into the reports, the data is overwhelming.
Have a look at a standard Google Analytics report. Look across the top at the traffic over time for a selected date range. Do you know what bounce rate is? It’s when people leave right after coming to your website. Below that, we tell you geographically where people come from, and then virtually where people come from. On the left side navigation, we start with the visitors, the content, the goals, then the e-commerce.
Understanding that mental model and applying it can really help.
The most relevant part of the reports is in the content section. Any one of those sections will have great data for you to look at. Number of entrances and landing pages, bounces and bounce rate. Bounce rates are a big opportunity.
Next is funnel reports, one of my favorites, do you know about this? People can enter through the center or side of funnels and you want to look at where people are leaving the funnels, the leaky pages. It’s valuable to know something about your site. Where people are exiting is a great place to start.
Then I have a look at site overlays, where people are clicking, converting, buying. It’s very useful. Just looking at this you can come up with some great ideas. Maybe switch placements of products or services on the page. It will give you some ideas.
Internal site search: basically, if you have a search box on your website, are people using search within your website? We have a whole section of reports on site search. Where did visitors start their searches and which page did visitors find?
Back to the question: how do you know if it’s the ad or the page?
We have Analytics pages on landing page optimisations: shows keywords and entrances. You select “non-paid” keywords, and take a look at the bounce rates. Take a look to see if the page is the problem. Select “paid” keywords, and it tells you 0% bounce rate! So that means it’s not the ad copy that needs rewriting, it’s the page that needs attention.
One practical tip: I’ve worked for small and big companies; sometimes in a small company you can go to the main point of the website. But in a big company you sometimes need some consensus building: I believe in something but I really needed my client to believe in it. So start small, focus on improving one area of the site.