If you have an eCommerce business, chances are you rely heavily on people who visit your website. That said, one of the best tools available for understanding the metrics behind website traffic is Google Analytics (GA). Although GA is free, it takes online marketing knowledge to understand how to use it to tweak things like SEO optimization.
Broadly, GA is a web analytics tool that singles out specific data about website traffic. The data is presented to the user in easy-to-read and understandable reports. There are various types of reports that present visual representations of the data. Visual data lets us gain greater insights into those who visit our websites.
The Importance of GA Metrics to Marketing Insights
From an eCommerce perspective, gaining insight into who visits your website is a question of understanding where a potential customer is in the purchasing journey. When someone uses a web browser to research the purchase of a specific product, the browser (usually Google Chrome), presents the user with search results. Hopefully, the user chooses your website because you’ve done the necessary marketing techniques to get listed on the result page.
Once a user gets to your website, there are numerous possible outcomes at this point. The visitor might leave after a few seconds or visit a product page or any number of different actions. GA helps online marketers nudge those visitors at different spots in the purchasing journey into a shopping cart and eventual purchase.
Keep in mind, GA does not identify individuals. The best it can do is report data that supports (or doesn’t support) something you did to get people to visit your website. Online marketing experts like those at Web Rocket Media use techniques that increase your web traffic then analyze data to find ways to get visitors into the final part of the purchasing journey.
The 10 Most Commonly Used GA Metrics
Active Users–This metric reports the number of people currently viewing a website. If your website has multiple pages, you can find out which pages get the most visits. You can also find out which pages users spend the most time on. If you want to launch a marketing campaign with expert content, you can gain insights into information in the content from page visits.
Demographics–Related specifically to marketing to a target market or sector, you can find out if the marketing techniques are attracting the correct audience. In other words, content marketed to ten-year-olds should only attract adults with credit cards ready to buy for that ten-year-old.
Geographic Location–This metric does not give specific locations of individual users. Rather, it groups users into regions. This helps those eCommerce businesses that sell products across international borders where different languages are used. You can also tell if a user changed what language they viewed your page with. This metric could also help refine local traffic results for a lawyer or doctor’s office.
Smartphone or Desktop–With much of the online world using smartphones to browse the web and purchase things, knowing if someone is browsing with a smartphone or a computer desktop can be helpful for those in eCommerce that target one or the other. Given the difference in viewing conditions, a marketing plan based on this metric could make or break sales goals.
Traffic Origin and Destination–GA lets users know where users were before they came to your website and where they go after they leave. Marketers want to know this number because it lets them know what acquisition channels are bringing traffic to the website. Knowing this data helps marketers like those at Web Rocket Media drive traffic to your website with things like social media advertising and pay-per-click pages.
User LTV–This stands for user lifetime value. You can track users based on what they did on your website then use this data to target repeat customers. When combined with things like promotions, an eCommerce store can maximize customer loyalty. This metric works well for tracking potential contacts in a contact list after they’ve signed up for something.
New or Returning Visitor–eCommerce businesses need new and returning customers to maintain a stable profit margin. Consequently, this metric is crucial for market segmentation. When combined with User LTV, you can target specific segments of your market with specific advertising campaigns. For example, offering a free trial to someone who signs up for a newsletter.
Session Tracking–The amount of time a user spends on your website is called a session and it’s an important aspect of an online advertising campaign that uses social media to get people to visit your website. You want to know if traffic is coming directly from a platform such as Facebook so you can measure the effectiveness of a Facebook advertising campaign.
Bounce Rate—This metric reports on the number of website visitors who came then left quickly without doing anything else. A high bounce rate could mean the website had technical issues. Or it could mean people don’t want to stay and you need to work out ways to keep users’ attention.
Page Load Time—One thing the cyber age has done to consumerism is interject impatience into the buying experience. If it takes longer than a fracture of a second for a page to load in a web browser, users are likely to go somewhere else. Thus, page load times give insights into the user’s need for a quick response.
Closing Thoughts
Understanding how to use Google Analytics to gain insights into your website traffic is an essential aspect of effective online marketing. When you hire Web Rocket Media for your online advertising, you need your new partners that know how to use Google Analytics to drive traffic to your website. The team at Web Rocket Media specializes in eCommerce advertising. From social media to email marketing, the analytics team works with you to get results.