Get to the heart of where you are, to find out where to go next
Here’s a scenario I’ve come across, time and again.
Someone spends months curating and designing their perfect website. This is something they’ve labored over, alone or with a developer, to create a shining, perfect digital platform for their business. Perhaps, it’s an e-commerce store, or even something as simple as a one-pager with a contact form.
Let’s assume, in this scenario, that you set up Google Analytics just days before your launch. Maybe you checked it out once or twice, but let’s face facts. You’re running a business, and that’s always going to be Priority One. That trickle of data is interesting, but you have other things to do, and only so much time in the day.
Six months pass. Your business has had some ups and downs, but your traffic seems to have plateaued. More often than not, your website sits at the center of a network of social media posts, ads, email marketing, and other media meant to draw eyes and convert a visitor to a client or customer. These tools need to be calibrated to your target audience, which can take some time to get working right. For instance:
- Your Instagram posts aren’t driving the traffic to your website as you expected.
- That one really fabulous core blog post you wrote for your coaching business hasn’t caught anyone’s attention as designed.
- A critical point in your sales process may be losing visitors before they can convert to customers.
You’re not sure, but you can’t help but think your platform could be performing better than this.
Why Data Doesn’t Get Leveraged
Here’s the issue I see people have with Google products. It’s actually a really similar problem people used to have with Microsoft PC products, spawning the ‘Mac vs PC’ commercials that ran from 2006 to 2009.
While the core Workstation products (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides) have been weathered down into familiar shapes, the Google Marketing Platform (Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize and Data Studio) is designed for “marketers, analysts and developers”. To make matters more complicated, Google introduced Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as a replacement to the older version, now called Universal Analytics (UA) in their documentation.
The rollout for this particular upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as initially announced. Despite the promise of machine learning-powered analytics engine drew a lot of people towards it when the update was launched, it was reported to be missing a lot of core features from the older version and focuses more on the use of BigQuery, a Big Data feature meant to handle enterprise-scale raw data. Until Google updates the core feature set and available integrations, the comparison is more similar to using a nimble sedan with an automatic drive, versus a one-tonne manual drive 4X4 pickup truck.
All of this confusion and complexity tends to converge on the business owner who just wanted to scan their web data for a high-level view of where their platform might be optimized. More often than not, users who don’t have a targetted approach tend to wander around the platform aimlessly, make a few notes on what’s performing well, and then put off analysis for another day.
However, as the person directing your content marketing, there are several questions you can put to your data in order to start teasing out a narrative.
- How are visitors engaging with the content?
Content is key in the user experience flow of a website. For instance, if your visitors leave the website after first reaching the home page, this can be an indication of a failure to hook the reader quickly enough.
Navigating to the Behaviour tab of Google Analytics provides the engagement reports for your site content. This section gives an overview of the visitor traffic across your site at the page level.
In particular, this section will draw out the broad strokes of which pages are effective at driving traffic to your site through the Landing Pages Report. This section will highlight which content (such as a blog post, or a product) are driving the most visitors, and can also give information on whether users were more likely to engage with more content on the website, or convert (to a customer, or to perform a specific action)
Information on what isn’t working can be even more valuable. Bounce rates, or the percentage of visitors that arrive on a page and then quickly leave, are especially useful in figuring out if something is driving users away from your site. Paired with exit page metrics,
- How are people finding my website?
The Acquisitions tab has an option called Search Console. Previously called “Google Webmaster Tools”, the Search Console is an add-on to Google Analytics. The primary benefit to going the extra mile to get this feature is to identify the search terms visitors are using to find your website, how your site ranks using those terms, and whether people using those terms tend to stay on your website.
For instance: if a recent blog post has a lot of hits in the search console, a marketer might surmise that their SEO strategy is working properly, and create more content to similar topics.
- What can I find out about my audience?
While demographic and interest data are in limited supply unless your visitors are supplying that information to you through a form, there is still quite a lot of information that can be used to streamline your future content.
Consider this example, from a Steam game release: in late 2021, a developer released an indie game that featured a giant crab, which users could control. Having audience metrics available through the Steam platform gave access to his geographic sales data, alerting him to the fact that it had gone viral in Japan, despite its English-only content. With this information, the developer was able to explore translation and localization options for the small narrative script within the game.
Google Analytics has similar information available in the Audience tab under Geo which can be used to calibrate follow-up content while the Behaviour section just below this can give you the ratio of new to returning visitors to your site. But buyer beware: huge spikes in visits, especially with high bounce rates, could indicate spam and/or bots targeting your site. Getting locations data in this use case can be the first step in identifying and quarantining junk data that’s obscuring your actual visitor information.
The Technology and Mobile sections identify the browsers and types of mobile devices used when accessing your site. Knowing whether your visitors are accessing your website from a static location or while on the go is useful when designing shorter or longer-form content, or catching errors in your design. Having a high bounce rate for mobile users, for instance, can tell you that your design needs to be better optimized for mobile.
While the consolidation in browsers, the retirement of Internet Explorer, and the development of best practices, basic styling (CSS) will typically work on all browsers in 2022. That being said, edge cases still exist. Furthermore, an animation technique employed to stunning effect by a designer in Google Chrome may fail miserably in Opera. If bounce rates are high on a page coming from a specific browser, it may be a cause for investigation.
- Are my campaigns reaching my audience?
When websites release new products or content, there is often a follow-up social media component. Knowing which platforms reach your desired audience, and designing your campaigns to capture that group is key. For instance, an influencer on Instagram may be a strong strategy to reach an audience looking for designer bags. However, a digital contractor may find Facebook ads to be a better means of reaching their audience, and a new author might find increased success with a Tiktok campaign. Digital advertising costs add up fast though, and the landscape grew even more volatile since Apple dealt a blow to the money machine that is Facebook Ads in mid-2021.
Under the Acquisitions tab will take you to a section called All Traffic > Source / Medium, which will give the traffic breakdown by type – Direct, Organic Search (search engine), Social, and Referral (e.g. email marketing) are the main categories.
If you have one campaign on one social media platform, this might be enough to go on. Digital marketers often run multiple ads per platform in order to calibrate their messaging to the best effect. This is the point at which tagging campaigns become critical. Through Google Tag Manager, an Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) – yes, that’s really what they’re called – can be attached to the end of an ad URL to provide data on the source, medium, content, and campaign, which are funneled into you Google Analytics dashboard for your review.
While this is hardly a comprehensive list – tracking conversion funnels is a rabbit hole unto itself – these four questions are enough to give the average website owner enough information to see the broad strokes of the story their web analytics data is trying to tell and set the stage for future growth.
To discuss analytics, quickstart web solutions, or potential collaborative work, visit the contact page and drop a line to Garden Nook Studio.