Understanding Your Visitors Via Google Analytics

Tools like Google Analytics give you an insight into your customer base that can’t be matched by giants in the brick-and-mortar field. You actually can see what people have in their minds when they come to your website or online store, and you can use that information to expand your product line if people aren’t finding what they’re looking for. For years, companies have spent millions of dollars on survey takers, focus group agencies, and consultants, but the information they have gotten is not as accurate as what you can get out of Google Analytics, which is free.

If you’ve already got Google Analytics installed on your site, you only have to make a few clicks to see what your visitors are looking for. On the left hand menu, click “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords” to get a list of all the words people are typing into search engines in order to find your site. If you want to see how well you web pages match up with public opinion, you can look at the columns in the middle, an on the right hand column you will see the label “Bounce Rate” which indicates how many people jump off the site after only visiting one page for that keyword. Toward the center of the column, the “Pages/Visit” and “Average Time on Site” categories offer a highly insightful look into whether people explore more pages on your website, and how long they stay. An average bounce rate can range from 35 to 50% for natural traffic, but it can be far lower with targeted paid traffic.

The list of keywords itself can be very valuable, with the caveat that you’ll probably see some strange searches in the list if you get enough traffic. As a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company, Web.com Search Agency gets odd queries like “jack first page search engine listings without any seo knowledge” or "can you fool local business center" even though searches like these are not indicative of the audience we are serving. Since our site is a source of SEO knowledge intended for a broad audience, some of our visitors are looking for topics that are beyond the scope of what we offer, what we would recommend, or even what is possible. The vast majority of our searches are relevant to search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and the many free SEO tools we have on our site. Incidentally, hosting free tools, calculators, and widgets on your own site is a great way to get repeat visitors, unsolicited links, and positive attention from the search engines.

Once you’ve got a long list of keywords (preferably from a few weeks of visits or more) what should you do with it? First of all, it needs to be studied in context. If you have your keyword list open in Analytics, you can scroll to the bottom and filter the list by one or two main keywords. This will give you an idea of all the variations people are using to find you. You can see the average bounce rate for your filtered keywords, and you may get a better idea of which words get better results, a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit. If you’ve set up goal conversions in Analytics, you can even see which keywords are leading people to fill out a form or make a purchase, which is information that you can feed back into your paid marketing campaigns. If you’ve got a group of words and phrases that have a very high bounce rate, you can likewise add these into PPC as negatives, or adjust your website to entice these visitors to stay.

When you use Google Analytics to make improvements, you can also see how well an adjustment to a web page is working. For instance, if you keep track of when changes are made, and follow your bounce rate for the same period of time, you can see if there is a positive or negative response to the change. If you’ve got more than one website, you can compare analytics reports to see if one version or the other is getting a better response rate. Instead of hiring a market research firm to tell you what a sample group likes, you can use Google Analytics as an audience response tool that gives you unvarnished information.

Google Analytics can also give you data segmented down to the user’s city, state, connection speed, and screen resolution. This can be very important depending on your demographic, since some audiences may not be fully up-to-date with fast connections and wide screens, so they are more likely to leave a site if it loads slowly or requires horizontal scrolling. Some recent changes in Google may also be benefitting local merchants in their own areas, so they may be seeing a lower bounce rate from nearby visitors, or a higher conversion rate from people who want to shop locally.

If you’re marketing a product to a nationwide audience, you can see how well the site is received in different regions of the country. When used in conjunction with offline marketing initiatives like TV commercials, infomercials, print advertising, and radio ads, Google Analytics can actually count the number of people who came to your site or a particular page. By cross-referencing this data with broadcast times and publication dates, you can learn a lot about the buying cycle associated with your product or service. You can also compare regional audience responses to your media and make adjustments.

A final piece of the information puzzle solved by Analytics involves what you aren’t finding when you check your site statistics. If you have great search engine rankings for several terms, but few clicks, then you may have chosen keywords that don’t get very good traffic. You may notice that there is a lack of traffic from a particular search engine, which may indicate a penalty of some kind. You can also use the Benchmarking feature to see data on other sites in your field, so you can get a quick idea of whether you’re experiencing results relative to your market segment.

Google Analytics and related programs like ClickTracks, Omniture, and WebTrends have made it possible for small businesses to get customer information that used to be jealously guarded by large corporations. One advantage for store owners who are also webmasters is that they have the flexibility to act on this information in a short amount of time, so a site can be improved in the space of a few months to account for customer behavior and preferences. Additionally, store owners can use their keyword visit histories to expand product lines or offer services that site visitors are demanding. Given enough time and information, your ability to read your customer base’s mind can provide the kind of hefty dividends that people outside the virtual world can only dream of.