Kori Ashton helps you interpret Google Analytics numbers to apply them to your WordPress website’s content strategy. This will improve your rank as well as user experience. This could even improve your conversion/sales.
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Full Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton, and so many of y’all have tweeted to me, DM’d me, emailed me and asked how do we interpret the information that Google Analytics is giving us, and use it to improve user experience on our website, and even our search engine optimization? What do we do with this, all these numbers, all these graphs, all these charts? How do we reapply them to our strategy? I’ll show you some tips today to hopefully help you do just that.
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Let’s go take a look at Google Analytics.
All right, y’all, your Google Analytics dashboard might look a little different from how I have mine set up, but the numbers are really what we wanna pay attention to, and specifically three different areas right over here:
- Your audience, that is, who actually comes to your site and what is their demographic, where are they coming from, as in their location.
- Acquisition, how did we get them to come to the website? These are really important things to know inside of all your digital marketing efforts.
- And the behavior, what did they do once they were on your site? So, breaking these three things down, we’ll really be able to grab out some numbers and understand how to reapply them to our content strategy, our page improvement, our conversion improvement, right?
Google Analytics Home
Setting A Timeframe
Overview really quickly, staring at me right now, these numbers and kinda how to apply these immediate numbers. Obviously you can see your traffic. This is over the last seven days. You can toggle that and have it set to a custom, or maybe set to a 30 days, 28 day, whatever you like it to be. And you notice that seven day upswing. We’re having a pretty good upswing right now, so that’s encouraging.
Users Versus Sessions
So, you’ll wanna monitor your users versus sessions. Basically what that means is 154 people, users, came to this website in the last seven days 159 times, so we had a couple repeats. That’s kinda nice to see.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate means that they landed on a page and they clicked their back button immediately, they did not go anywhere into your website. Now, they could have already read your phone number, and dialed your phone number, and called you, so you converted them.
They could have looked at your address for your location, memorized that, or tapped on it and gone to a map, right? They could’ve done something where they left your website, and you could’ve converted them. But, for the most part, what Google wants to see is them engaging and staying on your site, so these last two numbers are very, very important. You want your bounce rate to be super low, you want your duration to be super high.
So, your bounce rate, in my opinion, a healthy bounce rate is in the 30 or less range, 30% or less, so this particular client could work on lowering that bounce rate a little bit more. You might see a higher number if you’re really aggressively doing some new marketing inside of social networks.
Session Duration
Session duration, you want that number to be super high. This means they stayed on your website a really long time. They were watching your videos, they were clicking on your pictures, they were clicking page, to page, to page, reading your articles. Very exciting to see that type of engagement. So, there are your goals there. We want a high number, a high number, a low number, and a high number.
When Visitors Visit Your Website
This is important to interpret as well, when do your visitors visit your website? When do your users come over? You’ll wanna monitor this for the days of the week, as well as the times. If you start to see a spike and you realize, gosh, on Thursdays, we’re seeing a lot of activity in that 2:00 range, then remember that and try to schedule some posts, either your blog posts can publish at that time, or maybe your social networks can be more active at that time, because your visitors are there, they’re ready to engage with you. It’s a really good opportunity and a moment that you can potentially be interacting with potential customers or loyal fans. Another number to look at is just below that here.
Acquiring Users
So, how do you acquire the users? Basically, how are they getting to your website? Is this organic search where they’re finding you just naturally by searching a keyword on Google, Yahoo, or Bing?
Are they coming direct because maybe your car wrap is visible or they have your business card, or your billboard in town, or your print magazine ad that you’ve been doing? Whatever it is where you’ve been trying to get your name out, they’ve learned about your domain name, and they’ve dialed it in directly, and they’re right there on your website.
A referral, maybe somebody has linked to your website that you didn’t even know about. You wanna be monitoring those, definitely. And of course, if there’s any paid or other options, paid search is gonna be, obviously, if you’re running any Google Adwords, any sort of paid ads there with Google.
Top Devices
Another quick analytic to take a look at is what are your top devices? So, how many people are actually coming in off of mobile, versus desktop, versus tablet? The majority of us would probably see a higher number coming off of mobile, which is what they’re seeing here, but they’re actually seeing a lower number than their average, right? But here, there you go, over the last 28 days, the majority of their traffic’s coming in off of mobile, then desktop, then tablet. So, you wanna be certain of what those devices are so that your website is optimized for those devices, and you wanna be testing on those devices.
Looking Deeper Into Google Analytics
So, let’s dig a little deeper into these three over here, audience, acquisition, and behavior. There’s just a couple of quick highlights.
Google Analytics Audience
You could lose days clicking in here, clicking around and trying to learn all these numbers and interpret all these numbers, but I just want you to see briefly that you can take a look at your audience demographics and their location.
I want you to mainly study those two right now. You could, if you wanted to, also look at their devices, which is interesting to me. There’s all sorts of different ways to get creative and reapply this knowledge to your marketing strategy.
Demographics
But demographics, understanding their age and their gender so that you understand what sort of imagery to be using on your website, what sort of conversation you should be using, as well as what social networks. You might not even realize that you have a younger audience trying to come to your website. If you didn’t realize that, you might not know that you need to be on Instagram or Snapchat, right? There are opportunities here to really understand who your audience is.
Location
The location, as well, is interesting, because you wanna be certain that you’re using the correct terms to drive the audience, especially if you’re trying to go and venture your company out into other cities, as well as other states, or even other countries. So, super important to monitor those two underneath the audience tab.
Google Analytics Acquisition
So, next one, of course, is acquisition. It’s how did we acquire our visitors, right? Where did they come from? So, it’s really important to click on overview, take a look at that, and see how the breakdown works, how much are you spending on your ads versus your organic reach and all of your efforts writing those blog articles, creating that organic content. Is that working for you? This will tell you what your ROI is.
It’s very exciting to monitor this, and you can see also specifically where the traffic is coming from, you can find keywords inside of here, and you can find which social networks are working for you. Very, very interesting to take a look at acquisition.
Google Analytics Behavior
And lastly is gonna be behavior. This is where you really wanna understand where they’re coming into your site, where they’re spending their time, where they’re clicking around, kind of how long they’re staying on each page, time on each page. These things are gonna be really important to understand, not only where they’re landing, but also where they’re exiting.
Here’s why, this is how you reapply this knowledge now. You understand what pages are working. Maybe you’re using a certain landing page for a social media campaign that you’re doing, or an email blast that you’re doing, and you know that you’re driving traffic there. But you need to watch and see where they go from that page.
Are they filling out the form that you’ve got on there, are they calling your phone number, or are they clicking and going to another article? What’s intriguing them to click around and move through your website? Understanding their behavior on your website will allow you to write better content, to write more content angled toward their conversation and what they’re interested or engaging with. It’ll also let you understand what not to be doing. You’ll know on these exit pages, gosh, my highest exit pages right now are really some of my best landing pages that I needed to be making money from I need to go back and improve those pages.
Conclusion
Y’all, I know those were a lot of numbers, but it’s so important that you understand that Google gives us this information for free. They’re tracking all of this, and if we know what to look for and how to reapply these analytics, interpret them and apply them to our content strategy, you can actually seriously improve your ROI on your time and your money spent working through all of your content, improving your ranking, improving your conversion, improving that user experience.
I hope this helps you. If you have questions, you’re more than welcome to put ’em in a comment below, tweet to me, send me an email over at askkori.com. I’d love to help you as best as I can. I hope you’re having a great one. I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. By, y’all.
