He looks at his plan from different angles, seeks counsel, and identifies the right person for every job so that he can stay ahead of his competition.
One wrong move and there could be rippling effects.
Now, we’re in 2021 and not based out of a dreary post-WWI scenario. Which means we have Google Analytics to analyze our business.
And Google Analytics takes your business from driving with a blindfold to 20/20 vision.
It’s a free web analytics service that allows your brand to study your website behavior so you can adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
However, Google Analytics could appear overwhelming, which is why we’ve compiled the top 7 Google Analytics metrics so that you can use this brilliant tool to boost your marketing.
What are marketing metrics?
Marketing metrics are quantitative measurements related to your website traffic. For example, the average time spent on a page by your website visitors or the number of times people visited your website in a month.
These metrics help you understand your website’s strengths and weaknesses and give you tips on how to improve your content strategy to meet the interests of your visitors.
By analyzing your marketing metrics effectively, you optimize and create a better marketing strategy and achieve your business and sales goals faster.
Overall, marketing metrics help you learn how to market your products and services, where to market them, and whom to market them.
Now, let’s dive into Google Analytics a bit more.
Why do Google Analytics metrics matter?
Before the e-commerce age, people visited physical stores to buy a product. When products sold out like hotcakes, you knew your business was doing pretty darn good.
However, in the past couple of years, drastic changes have occurred, and consumers look for online shopping instead of in person.
Because of this trend, you need a way to fully understand (instead of guessing) how well your website is performing. Hence, Google Analytics.
From 1 website in 1991 to over 200 million active websites today, it’s safe to say having a website for your business is becoming more of the norm whether or not you sell physical or digital products/services.
A website increases foot traffic and improves marketing for physical stores. Most of your potential customers are online, where they can quickly learn about your products.
If you own an online store, Google Analytics will show you which products your customers are interested in based on the number of searches a product gets.
Still not sold? Take a look at these benefits:
- Traffic: You know the exact number of visitors your website receives within a specific period.
- Traffic sources: You learn where the visitors come from so you can effectively optimize your marketing campaigns.
- Page performance: You get to know the pages where your visitors spend most of their time on your website and the pages that convert users.
- Tracking ROI: You analyze your marketing activities’ return on investment (ROI) and create a formidable marketing strategy for your website or business.
And those are only a few highlights. Let’s chat more about the top Google Analytics metrics in detail.
The best Google Analytics metrics for marketing
Google Analytics metrics inform you about the marketing strategies that are working effectively.
They show the amount of traffic you’re getting and the behavior of visitors while on your website. It helps you develop and tweak your strategy to increase sales with the help of marketing metrics.
Let’s start with your site traffic.
1. Traffic
Website Traffic is the most basic marketing metric. It reveals the number of visitors to your website within a specific period. It can be a day, a week, or any custom period you set.
If your website is getting a small number of visitors, you may need to improve your marketing strategy. On another note, if you’re getting high traffic but not many conversions, that might indicate you need to tweak the copy, funnel, or design of a sales page.
2. Traffic Source
Imagine if you knew which type of ads brought the most traffic to your website. You could invest more in that type of ad and stop the ones that bring in fewer visitors. Instead of a “needle-in-a-haystack” approach to digital marketing, you can use data available to you to skyrocket your ROI and decrease (or optimize) your budget.
By monitoring traffic sources like email marketing, social media marketing, or paid search advertising, you can pinpoint which advertising channel brings in the most relevant traffic and adjust your plans as a result.
3. Average Time Spent
Average time spent is a metric that reveals how long your visitors stay on your website. It conveys the relevance of your content to the interests of your target audience. If your visitors spend a lot of time on your website, then you must be creating some epic content.
On the flip side, if they look like Mr. Incredible over here, it’s possible your content doesn’t resonate with their interests. Consequently, you should make some changes to your landing page, blog posts, or other elements of your marketing strategy.
4. Average Pages Per Visit
This metric shows the number of pages in your website visited by your traffic before they perform an action or leave.
Data from this metric helps you create the perfect navigation structure for your site. A navigation structure is how you virtually hold your customer’s hand throughout the process. Most visitors want to access whatever they are looking for fast. So, help them get to their destination by removing hurdles that only agitate prospective clients.
5. Top Pages
Your top pages are the ones with the highest traffic. They also show the duration visitors spend on various pages, bounce rate, and more. The top pages metric helps you to know which pages are adding the most to your marketing strategy so you can double down on that.
If your blog is slammin’ with traffic daily, keep compounding that strategy. But if your visitors are spending less time, you’ll need to do some split testing and experimentation to figure out what to fix.
Here’s a quick tip to increase engagement on your top pages: add a video. Your audience would watch a video to understand a concept further or simply because it stood out.
6. Exit Pages
Exit Pages give you insight into what causes your visitors to leave your site. It’s possible a potential client clicked on the wrong button, but it could be that these pages need to be reassessed.
The Exit Pages metric is a great resource to identify the pages that need optimization. It could be your services page or even your homepage. It may not fit properly in a phone compared to other pages, or it’s not as appealing as the other pages.
You can use the Exit Pages metric to increase users’ average time spent on your website, which inherently improves sales.
7. Bounce Rate
Customers leaving your site quickly after viewing a page is measured by your bounce rate. If you have a high number of bounces, then it’s a clear indication that your website needs a complete makeover.
High bounce rates indicate your content is not optimal or you’re targeting the wrong audience. So you need to improve your content strategy and redesign your website to meet the interests of your target audience.
