Right, so you’ve got your start-up off the ground and you’re wondering how to make sense of all that data in Google Analytics (GA). Focusing on the key metrics will help you prioritise what’s important. You’ll want to track traffic, revenue and conversion rates by channel to see what’s working. Check your top landing pages and work out why people are leaving. And find your most searched keywords so you can optimise your content. Using these basic analytics, you’ll get insight into customers and focus your efforts. Later you can look at paid tools like aHrefs, SEMrush and Screaming Frog to expand yur analytics as the business grows. But for now, stick to the basics in GA to inform your priorities.
Understanding Your Website Traffic
First, let’s get to some key metrics. Page views refer to the total number of pages viewed on your website. Visits (or sessions) track each time someone lands on your site, no matter how many pages they view. Unique visitors are the number of individuals accessing your site within a set timeframe – helpful for understanding the size of your audience.
Ask yourself where your traffic is coming from. GA breaks this down by channel – organic search, paid ads, social media referrals, etc. Dive into each channel’s metrics like bounce rate (Percentage leaving after a single page view), pages per visit and average visit duration. These insights reveal which channels draw engaged users exploring your site.
Your most popular pages and highly-searched keywords offer a lot of insight. Are people finding what they want? If not, you’ll need to work on how that landing page could be improved to meet with that searcher’s intent. Drill down into which search terms are, or are not, driving traffic to these pages, to make sure you answer those searches. Where possible, try to encourage visitors to view more pages on the site, having landed on this entry page. Could you offer more information with a link to another page? Could you display other products on that page that will offer more choice? These possibilities need to be considered, depending on the type of page searchers have landed on.
Putting Insight Into Action
Armed with this insight, you can prioritise your efforts.
- Improving underperforming but strategically important pages
- Tweaking paid ad targeting based on high-value traffic
- Focusing keyword research on user search behaviours
- And don’t forget those pages that are seeing lots of visits. Maximise ROI by making sure what you want to sell is on there front and centre
The traffic insights enable a truly user-centric approach to understand exactly how your site users engage with your brand. Over time, this focus on actionable metrics will ensure you spend time and money on what matters most, right now.
Track Your Goals
Is the traffic you are driving to your site, converting to sales or leads, as you’d hoped? That’s where conversion tracking in GA comes in. By setting up Goals, you can monitor exactly how many visitors are completing key actions like making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter, for example.
Look at the Goal Conversion Rate for different traffic sources and marketing channels. This shows which campaigns are most effective at scoring conversions – your highest priority metric. Low conversion rates could signal a leaky funnel that needs optimising.
Entry Pages
Not all landing pages are created equal when it comes to converting visitors. Use the Entraces report to identify the pages where people first arrive on your site. Then cross-reference those against the pages with the most Goal Completions.
The pages that attract and drive conversions are your highest-performing entry points. Focus on promoting and optimising those pages. For underperforming entry pages, revisit the copy and optimise for SEO while you’re there, review its design and ensure all calls-to-action are clearly signposted.
Follow The Conversion Path
The Reverse Goal Path report is a goldmine for understanding how users navigate and convert on your site. It surfaces the most common sequences of pages viewed before completing a Goal. Ask yourself, where do visitors come in, where do they go and why did they leave before converting? Check the whole navigation path on your website and ensure there are no friction points. All paths need to be clearly signposted so visitors don’t give up and visit your competitor instead. Remember to make your visitors’s website journey is as simple to navigate as possible, whilst ensuring your content is engaging and meets their expectation.
Keyword Queries Report
Head to Acquisition>Search Console>Queries. This report shows you the top keywords that led to clicks and impressions from GA results. Powerful filters let you view data by criteria such as clicks, impressions and position in SERPs.
Top Tip: You can get more guidance on keyword research here.
Expanding Your Analytical Data
As your business blossoms, it’s crucial to expand on your analytics capabilities to keep pace with your growth. While GA provides a solid foundation, more advanced tools can unlock deeper insights into your audience, competitors and market opportunities.
Investing in a premium analytics platform like aHrefs, SEMrush and Screaming Frog can give you significant competitive advantage. These tools offer a lot more information that GA does such as…
- Your competitors’ content strategies and top-performing pages
- Keyword gaps and opportunities to outrank your rivals
- Technical SEO issues impacting your site’s visibility
- Customer insight
Monitoring Usability
As your customer base expands, advanced analytics become invaluable to understanding their behaviours. Tools like Hotjar, Content Square and Crazy Egg provide session recordings, heatmaps and you can even carry out surveys to help you…
- Identify those friction points throughout the customer journey
- Optimise the website design and page experience
- Develop new product ideas to meet their demand
Understanding what these tools can offer you will unlock information that is critical to how you plan your digital strategy, so get the basics done first. As your business grows, you can layer on more sophisticated tools to support your longer-term strategy. If you wish to know more and would like me to help you interpret the data in order to make actionable decisions, contact me via email at josmithtoday@gmail.com.
DIGITAL TODAY - Digital Marketing Consultant 
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