Google Analytics- what is it and why’s it so useful?

Introduction

Okay, so you’ve forked out a ton on having a website built, but now, well, you’re wondering how many visitors your website is getting.

Just as if you’ve opened a new store in say the city centre of Bristol, or indeed if you opened a new shop in say Bath, England, you would want to know footfall numbers, how many people are coming through the doors?

If no one is coming into your store, from the high street, as a business owner you would be worried, as you would want to know why you are not making the sales that you had anticipated.

So, the same approach should be taken when you have a new website designed, that is, how many organic visitors are you getting, are they using a smartphone or a tablet? What’s the bounce rate like?

And, how do you find out all of this rather useful information? Well, you can simply get a Google Analytics account, and while you are at it, we would recommend that you also get a Google Search Console account as well.

So, what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a super useful tool, often you will need to add a “Google Tracking Code” essentially just a bit of code, which then helps to link to your Google Analytics account, then you can start to get useful information, such as how many organic visitors are you getting?

Then as you partner with your digital marketing agency, often the business, and also the agency will be able to see, are organic visitor numbers going up?

Do SEO agencies use Google Analytics?

Yes, is the short answer, well at least our agency does.

We find that Google Analytics offers very reliable information.

So, for example, when we are working with clients in Bristol, we will send out a monthly seo report.

For the organic visitors’ numbers, the bounce rate, and also the average time spent on a businesses website, our SEO consultants, will take all of this information from Google Analytics.

Sure, there’s many other tools you can use, however, with that said, our agency does use Google Analytics for a lot of our reporting.

Mobile vs Desktop

How many shoppers come to your company’s website by using a smartphone, such as an Android smartphone?

How many shoppers come via a desktop?

And, why does this matter?

Well, it matters simply because, let’s say you run a Bristol based business, and you sell luxury organic coffee, yet your SEO company has stated, that on Google Analytics the bounce rate on mobile is 90% where on desktop in comparison its only 20%, now a good marketing company will ask, why is that so?

Why is the bounce rate so high on desktop?

Now, what might possibly be found, is that the mobile website has a super-high bounce rate, that’s when compared to the desktop version of the website, simply because the main menu on mobile is difficult to use.

For example, a web developer may find that on some smartphones, that there’s a glitch with the mobile menu, which would obviously increase say the homepages bounce rate massively, if a shopper cant get to another page because the bounce rate is so high.

What does “organic visitors” mean?

Well, this is one of the main reasons that our agency uses Google Analytics, that’s because as part of the monthly reporting, we need to know exactly how many organic visitors a company has got.

We find here at this agency, that Google offers super reliable organic visitor information, plus, this can also be compared to say how many PPC visitors, or even how many visitors came via social media.

So Google Analytics is very useful, and our seo consultants use it every single month, when they are writing our agencies seo reports.

What does “bounce rate” mean?

So, this is another reason why a lot of agencies, like ours use Google Analytics, that’s to monitor a pages bounce rate.

So, for those that don’t know what “bounce rate” means, its simply mean this, what percentage of shoppers visit a page, then leave without visiting another? That’s why it called a bounce rate, as it refers to what percentage of shoppers have bounced off the page.

Now, let’s say you have a 90% bounce rate on your homepage, that’s high, so your agency may decide to carryout work to work out, well, why is the bounce rate so high?

Have you published a new piece of content marketing?

Lets say that you run a company, your business is based in say Clifton, Bristol, and you run a dental practice. You’ve hired an digital agency, to help you to get more cosmetic dentistry work, and they have put a lot of time into writing “evergreen content marketing”- so much so, you note that a lot of the marketing budget has been taken up through writing and creating this work, so obviously, as a business, you want to work out, well, is that work working, is it helping to obtain more organic visitors or not?