20 tips and tricks for mastering Google Analytics data (Part 1)

Reviewing and managing website traffic data is important to the success of a website. However, some webmasters consider the numbers incorrectly and not analytically enough to draw conclusions. By studying the right data, you can learn a lot about visitors and what they need.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most popular web analytics tool available today. Whether you want to monitor website traffic, analyze traffic sources or count sales and convert, the tool can perform almost all of your needs.

This article will introduce 20 Google Analytics tips to help you master the data so you can take advantage of them to help develop your website. Traffic metrics are the best statistics to analyze how the site grows and which areas are the most important. Hopefully these tips can provide insight to help you get new marketing concepts that drive more traffic.

1. Long-term statistics

Let's start with the basic content when examining each statistics page. For each dataset, you should consider both short-term and long-term values. By default, Google Analytics will display results from 30 back here. This is great for researching the most recent pages and posts and see which topics are growing.

However, by expanding the graphs to 3 to 6 months, you will look at longer trends, determine which pages are taking up most of the traffic from the search engine, the number of page visits. (pageview) and users' daily visits. If you've been building a website for a while, try expanding the stats for a year or even longer.

Long-term growth models provide information to help you get new strategies next year. It is very difficult to develop a website with good content and great results in just a few months. The strongest growth method is the stability and keeping the website online as much as possible (when compared to competitors).

2. Check visitor activity

Another thing to note is that not only focus on numbers based on page visits or total visitors, but you also need to know how many of those people see your content as useful, how long do they stay on each page and how many new guests leave?

Focus on the values ​​of Entrances , Bounce Rate and % Exit . Column Entrances will list the total number of visitors to the site on a given page. This can be the home page, a blog entry, or something else that draws the readers' attention. The Bounce Rate and Exit ratios are very similar, with one deciding factor. Bounce Rate will list the number of users accessing on a given page, then leave without accessing any other pages. The Exit rate calculates the number of people who left the site after accessing the same site, but they may have browsed other sites before.

All this information can be found in the same table with different statistics. Learn these numbers to understand their meaning. Find them in Content> Site Content> Content Drilldown.

Most site visitors will only get the information they need and never return. Offer appropriate content to attract their attention and stimulate them to explore more sites before leaving. And by equipping yourself with knowledge of traffic statistics, you can measure the success or failure rate that can occur.

3. Location of visitors

You might be surprised to know that visitors are accessing the site from different locations around the world. Google serves many countries in their own language and often sees their websites rank in foreign search results.

To know where visitors are: Audience> Demographics> Location .

The map shows the percentage of total visitors to a site from a particular country or territory. Darker blue shows more visitors and traffic from a certain location. You may be surprised at the number of foreign visitors looking to your site through search engines.

You may find that a lot of traffic from other websites is pushing new audiences into your blog or website. It can be very helpful to utilize this traffic through advertising or giveaways along with other related marketing ideas.

In addition, webmasters will sometimes publish translated content on websites. You can study this trend and determine how many visitors are using these translated pages compared to the original.

4. Check the Web browser

Trends of HTML5 and CSS3 have pushed towards a more unified website, but we still don't really have it. Many online sites do not support older browsers, and even some modern web sites.

Google Analytics provides you with the following browser-related data about visitors:

1. Web browser and version number
2. Operating system
3. Screen resolution
4. Flash / Java version

You can view this data at: Audience> Technology> Browser & OS .

To switch between different statistics, click on any link labeled 'Primary Dimension' above the data table. Here is an example of how to organize this data:

You can research your data and find that most IE users abandon the site in the first few seconds. This may be due to an error in the layout or some other effect that causes the loading time to be slow. Researching browser statistics and version numbers will help you keep track of what errors need to be fixed and which browsers need support.

If the audience has> 90% used a browser that supports CSS3, you don't need to worry about any backup methods.

5. Content with popular keywords

Your website may have a very small number of visitors, but most likely comes from search engines. Have you ever wondered what keywords they type led them to your site? Or what are the most popular keywords that lead many visitors to your site?

Of course, this information can be found in Google Webmaster Tools if you add that information to the website. However, Google Analytics can provide a more comprehensive set of data.

To get started, check this information in Google Analytics: Traffic Sources> Sources> Search> Organic .

Although Google Webmaster Tools explains how websites rank specific keywords and how many site visitors are using those keywords, Google Analytics also indicates what they are doing on the site. You can study the pages they visit, the number of pages they visit and how long they stay on each page. In fact, you can track all user actions in Google Analytics and research data to discover visitor trends.

After understanding and analyzing the keywords that visitors use and the pages they have visited, the question is: What to do with these keywords?

One idea is to learn about how users search the web and then provide specific but unavailable content for keywords using laser-targeted keywords . For example, when someone searches Google for "IE6 rounded corners" keywords, there are more results than 'how-to IE6 hacked CSS3 rounded corners'. The second set of keywords is more complex and returns less results, but provides more useful and targeted site rankings.

If a page on your site has these long-tail keywords, you can rank on the first page of results. The results are even better if the keywords are in the page title and they will be highlighted in Google rankings.

6. Flowchart of visitors

If interested in the "path" of visitors to the site, you can find this information in: Audience> Visitors Flow . The starting point is how each user accesses the site and the first block is the landing page they arrive. The blue lines connect the blocks together to represent the users visited on the first page and follow the chain to access other pages. You can study the direction of these lines to create pages that a typical user will follow when visiting your site.

You will notice thicker lines between the blocks if more users follow the same route. This can be a visitor on popular blog posts that lead them back to your home page and then see the most recently published article.

7. Research traffic

The level of visitor interaction measures the number of visitors who stay on the site over a long period of time. Visitors are more likely to stay longer than 60 seconds and often visit multiple pages. Each visitor is measured on their time on the site and will be grouped together based on duration.

Get this information: Audience> Behavior> Engagement .

This table will record the number of visitors and the total number of pageviews based on the time spent on the site. You should consider the column chart at the bottom of the table. The last two rows measure the number of visitors on the site in 10 to 30 minutes or longer than 30 minutes. This data is important because these are the most potential visitors out of all your traffic.

Check page views against total visitors. You can see the number of visitors with a long time is not much but only visit pages 1 to 10 seconds a lot.

8. Reverse link via referral source

Short-term and long-term referral statistics will help you find out which sites are sending you the most visitors. Now check the level of interaction of this traffic to see how long they spend and how many pages are visited.

Find them at: Traffic Sources> Sources> Referrals .

But in some cases, this referral traffic is published on a website. Social networking sites like Reddit and Hacker News are great sources of traffic for web designers and developers. This is because these networks have large designers, developers, etc. communities.

However, there are cases where you can earn traffic from websites that do not publish or publish. Think about things like links, blog posts that others may have added your link to on their site. In this case you are not likely to add links but can contact the owner or writer and say thank you for their backlink support.

9. HTTP latency

Website speed is more important than you think. Today Internet speed is much faster than before and T1 / T3 lines can push data faster. This means that if your web server cannot handle incoming traffic, visitors will eventually get bored and leave.

See website speed at: Content> Site Speed> Overview.

You can define a lot of ideas, especially in Page Timings, page-by-page details and the total average load time (in seconds).

Check Page Timings: Content> Site Speed> Page Timings.

Some pages with multiple images or video content may take longer than a text-only blog post. You must consider the information depending on the case to find the problem. Usually, websites link to third-party servers for JS plugins or CSS libraries (CSS libraries).

10. Traffic from social networks

Traffic referral from social networking sites is usually built through user input. This could be tweets or Facebook posts, or it could be discussions about articles or social networking sites. This data will provide some detailed information about the number of users sharing online links and the number of people clicking on them.

To view this information, visit: Traffic Sources> Social> Landing Pages.

The most popular landing page (landing page) is useful because you can determine which content is the most interesting. Be sure to look back on the data for months and maybe years to see new trends in the process.

1. 20 tips and tricks for mastering Google Analytics data (Part 2)