Using Google Analytics to understand website traffic

Google Analytics is one of the top and most powerful tools for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website. The metrics it provides, give you valuable insights into website visitation and also behaviour – ie, who is coming to your website and what they are doing when they get there. It can also tell you how users are able to get to your website and the content they are interested in.  

So what metrics do you need to keep an eye on to understand how your website is performing; and that will help you to get more traffic to your website? These are the things that you should be focusing on so that you will know what to do next with your campaign or with your site.

• Keywords. It is very important to know which keywords drive the most quality. By knowing which keywords have ranked high, you can work on these keywords and use it more on your website in order to make it easier to rank higher in organic search.

• Amount of Visits. It is essential to know the days and time that you have the most visit on your website. Having the knowledge of these important dates and time allows you to publish more content on that day where you will be getting more attention on your website.

• Top Pages. Understanding which page (or pages) is effective and performing well, will help you to know what type of content people are most interested in. You can use that information to then create more of that type of content.

• Referring Sites. Knowing what websites which are sending the most quality of your site, for example, which sites have mentioned your blog, your product or a social media channel that links your site is important. This is because, once you understand where your traffic is coming from, you can spend more time and resources in focusing on those sites and spend less time on those sites that are not performing well.

• Overview of Visitors. When you know who your visitors are and their intent in visiting your website, you will know what interests them and you can tailor that in your content.

Google Analytics is great and is free. It has a number of features that allow you to review how well users are interacting with your content and site. This is very important because you can identify how you can improve your site and quickly adapt.