5 Quick Google Analytics tips

Google Analytics (GA) is an indispensable tool to get more sales and enquiries from your website. Here are five tips to make GA work for you:

Conversion tracking for all actions

In these tough economic times, you have to justify each rand that you spend. GA provides you with the tools to report every action taken on your website. You should at the very least track sales and views of the “contact us” page. Tracking more actions like enquiry form, whitepapers and views of a key page, and assigning a realistic economic value to them, will help you justify your marketing budget.

Bounce rate

Monitoring your website bounce rate (the percentage of initial visitors to your site who “bounce” away to a different site) will help you improve users’ experience of your site and generate more sales from the same amount of traffic. Remember that a bounce rate of higher than 50% is bad. You can improve the bounce rate by changing the information, navigation or layout of the landing page. A lower bounce rate = more profit!

Long Tail is the big driver for traffic

Long Tail marketing refers to the use of a long string of keywords, instead of one or two, when targeting prospective clients. As 25% of searches in Google every day are new, you should not just focus on the top keywords. Make sure that you achieve high rankings for a higher number of quality keywords.

Compare keyword volume and traffic ranking

You should monitor your top 20 keywords for traffic received and their ranking in Google. This will help you see what influence your ranking in Google has on the number of clicks received from a specific keyword over time.

Use visualization tools

GA provides you with all the keywords people typed into Google to find your website. There are literally thousands of keywords, which is way too much information to easily analyse. Use tag clouds or other visualization tools to make sense of this data and turn it into useful information.