If you’ve invested time and money into a great website and thorough marketing, why wouldn’t you measure the impact of that investment? Determining what works and what doesn’t is the only way to consistently meet greater and greater goals. That’s why we rely on Google Analytics to help us measure the performance of our efforts. Here are four metrics we always keep a close eye on.
1. Source of Traffic
How are people finding you? This happens one of three ways. You have direct visitors, who type in your web address. We love these visitors because they carve out extra time to intentionally see us. We have referred visitors, who click on over to us from a different page – may be a blog that linked a post of ours, for example. Then we have search-for visitors, who came to our page by asking Google a question. Our link was at least one of their choices in finding their solution.
The number of each matter. If we’re only getting referral visits, we’re not standing out enough on our own.
2. Search Engine Ranking
Naturally, we want to be relevant and SEO-friendly enough to see our search engine ranking rise. We should test this as often as needed as we come up with key phrases that best describe our content. For instance, if you sell handmade jewelry in Seattle, you want to be on page one when you query “handmade jewelry Seattle”, and other variations of this. Read this marketing blog for more information on different ways to hook more people into finding you, thus elevating your search presence.
3. Shares
What is your content worth to your visitors? Does it instruct them, make them feel something, influence their decisions, or teach them something they never knew? If it does, your audience will share it on social media. The number of shares something gets is an indication of what interests your readers. That way, you can create more content that fills whatever need that successful piece met. Just be sure you’re not repeating or plagiarizing yourself. Think of more general insights like the format, tone, and larger topic.
4. Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate refers to visitors who visit one page and then leave. Obviously, visitors who bounce are not big converters, so we want to keep this as low as possible. In many cases, they bounce because they just wanted to see one thing before moving on. But other times, the bounce can be related to latency, lack of information, or complicated navigation. It may even be that they were turned off by something. For instance, maybe they added a product of yours to their cart but left when they saw the shipping rate. We need to watch the bounce rate to figure out what scares visitors away from us – so we can fix that!
Google Analytics really is the gift that keeps on giving – with it, we can continuously find new ways to engage, optimize, and make even more valuable offers to our audience. Knowledge is power, so start paying attention to the key metrics we discussed today, and take your website to new heights.
