Google Analytics: A Crystal Ball Into Optimizing Your Website?

There are literally thousands of blog posts that talk about best practices in Google Analytics. This is not that blog post. This is about the best use of Google Analytics. Depending on what type of site you have, you can use Google Analytics for a variety of reasons. For most of the clients at R2integrated though, websites are about lead generation, and when it comes to lead generation, Google Analytics is a crystal ball for website optimization. If you’re using Analytics as a way to understand how people got to your site or comparing the number of conversions month over month, then you’re not capitalizing on all that Analytics can do for you. Google Analytics shouldn’t be telling you what’s happening; it should be telling you what to do.

Each website has a purpose, an end goal you want visitors to reach. In order to optimize your site, first and foremost, you need to establish these goals and track them. Once you are tracking these goals, you can now begin using Google Analytics to optimize your site to increase goal completions.

To do this, the most important segment you can look at in Google Analytics is Visitors with Conversions. Although it’s great to know how people are getting to your site or how much time they’re spending on it, if they’re not converting, your website is failing. So when you look at your website analytics, don’t simply look at what people are doing on the site, look at what converting visitors are doing that’s out of character for your website’s traffic.

When you examine data in this way, you’ll be able to start developing a converting visitor profile – a simple, clear understanding of what a person who converts on your site looks like. A converting visitor profile should tell you where conversion traffic comes from, what they do when they get there, and what content on your site drives conversions, such as the one below:

“A visitor who converts tends to be a new visitor from organic search engine traffic who spends nearly twice as much time on site viewing nearly three times as many pages, most of which are pages within the Help Center.”

From this one sentence, we can now see where we need to focus our resources to increase the number of conversions to the site. For example, the fact that visitors with conversions are new visitors tells us a remarketing pay-per-click campaign isn’t as likely to be effective for this audience. Additionally, display advertising probably won’t generate conversions since most converting traffic comes from organic search traffic – an indication we need to continue capitalizing on SEO efforts. If new visitors are spending a lengthy amount of time on site and viewing more pages, then each page needs to show thought leadership and be filled with useful content that leads to another page that all eventually lead back to the Help Center.

From our converting visitor profile, we know that pageviews in the Help Center and conversions are related. When optimizing a site with this converting profile, then, funneling traffic to the Help Center is necessary. Pages on the site should seamlessly funnel from the homepage to the Help Center to the conversion page. If there isn’t an easy way to get to the Help Center from anywhere on the site, then there’s a good chance we’re missing opportunities to convert traffic.

When optimizing a website, developing a converting visitor profile is essential. By optimizing your site to reflect the behavior of converting traffic, you’re increasing the number of conversion opportunities and likelihood of conversions on your site.