Understanding how people behave while they browse your site might revolutionize the way you market your products and services. The more data you receive, the easier it is to adjust your strategy to get the desired ROI and improve customer experience.
Google Analytics is eliminating guesswork, showing exactly people’s actions while they are exploring your website, how long they are engaged, and determining the last page they jump on before leaving. All of the above affects conversion and retention and if tracked wisely can help you with creating a convenient website and a far more effective marketing strategy.
Analyzing User Behavior
Google Analytics helps to cover all the aspects related to customer behavior, identifying existing issues, and letting you prioritize them and address accordingly.
Start with behavior flow. It gives you a detailed overview of the traffic volume and its paths showing how people move around your site, how they get in, and get out of different pages. Comparing the time visitors spend browsing your website pages with the overall behavior flow helps to identify those pages that serve as website bridges, driving conversion.
On another note, seeing how people move around your website pages, how many clicks they make, can bring out existing issues with navigation. Hence, you can consider the data and work on website optimization to ensure a smooth customer journey on the site, especially when it comes to signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or just getting in touch.
Behavior flow can as well reveal the pages which people visit before they leave. When they leave from a “Thank you” page, for instance, it means that you’ve got them on board while if they jump off any other page without completing any action, you might want to see what’s making them leave. Scanning those pages that do not encourage visitors to become your clients will help you identify stop-points, eliminate them, and provide a more satisfying user journey.
Event tracking
Another great tool that Google Analytics offers is event tracking. To put it simple, it allows companies to track whether people are clicking on all of the interactive elements, like CTA buttons, navigation, links, pop-ups, and videos. If you provide any free-to-download material, you can also measure its success. Although setting it all up might take some time and effort, the tool is 100% justifiable. By getting all those calculations, you can adjust your strategy, amend CTAs, add them on, or provide more material if there is a good outcome in terms of downloads.
Besides, comparing behavior flow against event tracking may give you valuable insights into the full customer journey. It serves as an ideal visualization to understand what catches people’s attention and what stops them from moving forward.
Audience
Apart from letting you dive into the user journey, Google Analytics helps with identifying and segmenting site visitors. Companies get a comprehensive analysis of the places from where people jump on their site, their gender, and what device they are using while browsing.
Moreover, brands can also see when people visit their site, whether it is early morning or maybe right after midnight. Google Analytics is amazing at identifying such patterns, helping to reshape how companies present themselves and create marketing campaigns.
Besides, knowing the device people use might help brands to pay more attention to a mobile-friendly version and further optimize it or even think about testing a native app. Location details will show whether the website gets traffic from other countries. It might encourage companies to add more languages to reach more customers from around the world.
Pageviews
Knowing how many times people visited a certain page is great. But there are actually more benefits that companies can get from there. Google Analytics, when showing the number of people who’ve been to your web page, segments the first-comers and visitors who have viewed the same page multiple times. By comparing such patterns you can get a bigger picture of the relationship people have with the presented content. People might consider a blog post a relevant and reliable piece of information and get back to it, using it as a reference. Great, right?
On another hand, people might as well get back multiple times before making the final decision. It is usually observed when it comes to more expensive and luxurious items. We all need time to make our mind, read the reviews, evaluate the risks, study the alternatives and finally complete the purchase. Such a scenario is your chance to step in with a powerful CTA, like a good discount offer or a light push towards urgency.
However, multiple visits can be a sign of poor navigation or confusing design. This is when pageviews and behavior flow comparison will help you to identify if people move from page to another when they struggle to find the information they need. Broken links can also be a reason of poor conversion, stopping people from finding the right web page with the desired content. Evaluating user patterns helps to find out how the site affects customer’s decisions when they browse the website.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rates indicate the number of visitors who come and almost instantly leave without staying to explore more. There are many reasons behind that. First, it may refer to a broken opt-in form or an unclear offer. Bounce rates serve as great indicators of how the landing page performs, and they do it perfectly for PPC campaigns.
There are times when bounce rates are a positive sign. When a company’s site has high conversions, bounce rates indicate that it is good at qualifying leads and turns away people who are not a part of the TA. You end up saving your time to further serve people who are genuinely interested in your services.
Another thing to consider about bounce rates is the lack of a strong CTA. The web page might have all the relevant information that visitors need, be it a good article or industry statistics, but it might not have enough to encourage people to go further and convert. This is a common case for those pages with a dead-end, without an offer or a CTA.
By sharing all types of information on the bounce rates, Google Analytics serves as an amazing tool for website optimization. The more you pay attention and analyze the numbers you get, especially if high bounce rates are accompanied by low conversion, the more benefits you receive in the long run. There is always a reason behind people leaving and it may be anything from a bad CTA button, confusing content, or old-fashioned design.
Time on page
Another tool, provided by Google Analytics, measures the exact time people spend on the website. Such data brings quite a handful of useful insights. Companies can find out how much time people take to engage with interactive content, proceed to a certain action, or realize that they clicked on the wrong link and got to a completely different site. Knowing such metrics can help brands work on improving user experience and offer more user-friendly design that will encourage people to stay longer.
A good start is a convenient and appealing website. Those people who are first visitors should have a wish to explore more. Even if they are not planning to. Even if they are searching for something else or click on the link by mistake. As a rule, you only have 15 seconds to impress. 15 seconds until they either close and leave or stay and explore. You should use it wisely and analyze time-related data to benefit from it.
To Sum Up
Google Analytics uncovers amazing insights on what exactly people do when they are on your website. With all the existing tools, you can evaluate how good the visitor experience is and whether there are things that do not resonate or give a wrong impression about the brand.
Using the data they get, companies can ensure to provide site visitors with the right design, clear navigation, and strong, relevant CTAs. It perfectly complements one another and captures people’s attention. You will be able to create a brand’s voice that resonates with your site visitors and adds the right amount of inspiration to encourage them to stay.
In case you have any related questions, let us help you figure out how to set up Google Analytics correctly. Just click a Contact Us button below and we will assist you with your query.