10/12/2021 - All About Analytics: Actioning Analytics for Web | Website Blog | Purple Creative Studio
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All About Analytics: Actioning Analytics for Web

We are now on our third instalment of the analytics series! Having covered a brief overview and some key tools for your business to use, analytics should be a little more familiar now. So you’ve got all your data and research now but what should you do with it? Fear not, as we are about to take you through how to utilise all those charts, graphs and numbers to boost your website traffic and performance. 🚀

Your website is a key part of your business whether you use it to sell products, advertise services or share news and updates, it’s important to try to get the most out of it by actioning analytics. 

🔍 Getting Found 

There’s no point in having a website if people can’t find it! So it’s important that we keep an eye on how people are finding our websites and increasing their chances of doing so. 

Google Analytics generates lots of data based on the people visiting your website and it’s a great place to start when actioning data. The Audience section tells you all you need to know about your traffic including how many visitors you have had to your site, where they’ve come from (in terms of social media, direct search etc) and how long they’ve spent on your site as well as the pages they’ve visited.

If you’re not getting much organic search traffic you may need to look at the keywords you’re targeting within your site content and how that impacts your ranking in the search engine results page. Keywords are words and phrases people use in their search queries to find what they're looking for and should be used in various places on your site, including your page content, product names, and file names! They help Google to pair your website with user’s searches so your site can appear in the results page. 

It's a good idea to do some keyword research for your pages and use them in your content. Think about what keywords you want your site to rank highly for - what might a user search in order to find your page? Keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest, Google Trends or AnswerThePublic can help you to find any niche keywords your potential customers are using. Using keywords within your content is a great way to improve traffic and help build your SEO strategy, but be careful not to stuff them in as this can negatively impact your SEO rankings. You also want to make sure your pages use keywords not only in the body text, but also in the title, URL and headings of the page to give Google a clear idea what your page is about.

The length of your content is also key - if your pages have one or two lines of text and lack relevant keywords, it’s likely that the content will fail to a) engage the reader and b) tell google what your page is about, so unlikely to rank highly in search engine results page, leaving your site harder to find! 

A great way to target keywords and create some longer content is by blogging regularly. Your blog can contain a range of content such as business news, product launches and industry updates, but can also offer helpful advice and FAQs to allow you to target those more niche keywords. Plus, blogging is great to increase both your ranking and traffic by providing content that's not only relevant but is also being frequently updated. By providing new content for search engines to index, this helps solidify you as an up to date source of content. 

Guest blogging on other more established sites with high authority can also be a great way to get your page found and direct traffic back to your own site. Not only does this build your credibility, but it also showcases your site to a new and larger audience.

Once you've got your blog posts together, you want to be sharing the links to them across your social media platforms to help drive people to your site! 

🩹 Getting People to Stick Around


Once you’ve got a visitor to your site, it’s so important that you keep them on there! So make sure the content you’re sharing and the keywords you're targeting are relevant to one another. 

You also need to look at bounce rates - a ‘bounce’ represents a user that has visited a page on your site but has then left without interacting with it. High bounce rates typically indicate that the website is not doing a good job of attracting the continued interest of visitors.

So, looking at your bounce rate can give you insights into whether you’re sharing the right information on your site, if users find it engaging enough to make a purchase or take an action, and if you’re giving users a clear next step. If your site has a high bounce rate it may be because your site isn’t performing well and doesn’t have a great user experience or the users didn’t feel the content was what they were looking for. 

Analysing your Exit Pages can also be helpful (found in Behaviour > Site Content > Exit Pages). Exit Page data shows you the pages where people are leaving your site, narrowing it down where people are leaving to an exact page so you can take a look at why this may be the case and improve by tweaking text, design and imagery to get people to stick around!

You can help to reduce your bounce rate and increase the time visitors spend on your site (and hopefully the number of conversions!), by including links to other relevant content on your site. For example if you mention a product make sure you link the user directly to that page, or if you’re writing some helpful blog content try linking to a similar article to offer your readers more. Have clear calls to action at the end of your page content too - it’s important to make sure there’s always somewhere to go next!

If people aren't sticking around this can also be a sign of poor user experience such as pages taking too long to load, broken links and tricky navigation. If a page has a high bounce rate it's a good idea to give it a thorough look over to ensure nothing is broken and perhaps have it reviewed by other members of the team or your web developer to gather feedback on the site's user experience and how to improve this. Visitors may also be leaving your page as they’re not being shown relevant content in relation to their search query. So you need to make sure that the content you’re offering targets the relevant keywords and search queries to answer user questions. 

🎬 Getting People to Take Action


It’s likely that once you have a visitor to your website you’d want them to take an action, right? Whether that be to purchase or enquire, the ultimate goal is for them to convert. 

Using analytics is great to see conversion rates for your website, and it’s particularly useful to track specific goals on your site. For example, if you are selling a product you may have one of your goals set to be ‘purchases’ or ‘added item to cart’. If you are running a business that offers a service you may look at the number of bookings, how many people filled out a contact form, or the number of newsletter sign-ups. 

Using goals to track these conversions can help you to monitor visitors’ journeys on site. For example, if people are making it to the contact page but are then leaving the site, why is this? Is it because your site isn’t intuitive enough with its forms? Is the form not loading quickly enough? Does it have too many fields to fill out? All of these things could help you improve your forms and encourage more sign-ups. 

You may also see that lots of users are leaving your site without purchasing, which can be down to a number of things including slow site speed or the way your products are presented on the site. Using analytics is a great way to troubleshoot issues like this. If people are placing products into their cart then getting to the checkout and abandoning this could be a sign your site has a poor user experience making it hard to shop, there’s an issue at checkout or perhaps doesn’t have a good range of popular payment options.

We know that was a lot to take in but it really shows just how much there is to gain from using Google Analytics for your site and actively using the data received to improve your website’s performance and profits. It can really help generate new ideas for your marketing strategy and help you analyse previous efforts. Perhaps you didn’t think a particular advertising campaign was worth the money? But then you see it’s actually making up 60% of your referrals and is worth keeping - all your time and effort has paid off! 

In our next post, we will be looking at actioning your social media analytics, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the new year. Interested in using digital marketing and analytics to grow your business in the meantime? If you’d like to see how we can help you use analytics please get in touch

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