5 Ways to Maximize Google Analytics
If you have a website, you no doubt look to Google Analytics for some of your metrics data. It’s the way you know how much traffic your site is getting and what pages are the most visited. The information that Google Analytics gives you drives a lot of decisions you make about your SEO and other Internet marketing activities. But, are you sure you’re getting all that you can out of Google Analytics? If overall site traffic and most visited pages are the bulk of what you look for, you can bet you’re not.
Here are five things you should be doing to maximize the power of Google Analytics:
- Tracking In-Page Analytics
In-page analytics gives you a window into what links people are—or are not—clicking on individual pages. This lets you see if some of your links are ignored (or not even seen) as well as which ones may be getting the most activity. Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions about your page layouts, navigation and which links may be most appropriate for which pages. You can access this through the Behavior tab in GA—look for In-Page Analytics and follow the instructions.
- Monitoring Page and Site Speed
You have probably been annoyed more than once when visiting a site with painstakingly slow load times. Well…here’s your chance to stay on top of your own pages and know which ones need a little boost to prevent your visitors from having that same experience. Through the Behavior tab in GA, you can see the pages on your site with your slowest and your fastest load times. You can also learn from Google’s suggestions on how to improve page loading speed.
- Identifying Your Problem Pages
As wonderful as it would be to think that every page on your site performed equally well, that’s often not the case. Tracking high-performing pages is good but one could argue that it is actually more important to know which pages are not carrying their share of the weight. From the Behavior tab, look for Exit Pages. This will show you from what pages most people are leaving your site. This lets you know where to target your efforts to keep people with you.
- Watching Behavior Flow
Knowing where people come into your site and where they leave is great but you also want to know what they do while on your site. You can see what some common flows and behaviors are with this feature. You can then better identify what content to serve up to direct visitors to your lead-generating pages.
- Choosing Your Analytics
Because Google Analytics offers you access to a wide variety of data, navigating the dashboard can sometimes feel wieldy. You can avoid that problem and stop wasting your time by setting up a custom dashboard that has only the metrics you want to see. You can even create more than one dashboard. On the Dashboard menu, simply select New Dashboard and you’ll be on your way.
Another bonus tip is to set up alerts in the Intelligence Events section of GA. This will generate an alert to you when there is a unique event that results in a bit jump in traffic to your site.
It can be easy to get in a rut when looking at analytics and that can end up preventing you from getting the most use possible out of the data available to you. Let these tips help you get more out of your site analytics.
