The Bamboo Garden has been very fortunate over the years to work with some amazing clients; the privilege of that is being able to shape and grow our clients’ business and see first-hand, the positive impact this has on their customers.
We believe life is not just a straight line; there are ups and downs and the same could be said for businesses. You improve, you grow and then there will be periods of decline, you change and you improve and grow again. The cycle repeats.
At The Bamboo Garden, we are always on the lookout for ways to improve and grow. We look at our numbers to help us grow. We are also a firm believer on what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done.
So, measurements. What should you measure, why is it important and what does it mean?
In this article, we’ll take a look at Google Analytics. The starting point for any business is driving traffic to your website (and if you don’t have a website – call us immediately! You need to get a website, it’s 2017!).
Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that can provide you a great deal of insights from who the visitors are, their gender, demographics, interests, location, and what device was used to visit your site, through to how they navigate your site, how long they spent on each page and the page they last viewed before dropping off.
Let’s compare this to a retail shop; would a salesperson be able to get all that information? Maybe, but it will be a wild guess. Or maybe a TV commercial, who is really that program or that ad? What are they like? Again, maybe, but it will be a wild guess.
As you can see, Google Analytics is a very powerful and the more you can pull apart the numbers, the better. As they say, numbers can tell a story and it can tell a story about your business.
What you should measure
Audience – number of users
The first thing you want to know is the audience numbers, how many people are visiting your website? What is the trend? Is the number of visitors going up or down?
If it’s going up, why? What have you done that is driving traffic to the website? Are you running a Facebook campaign or maybe you are running some Google ads?
If it’s going down, why? We’ll look at the why as you drill further down and look at other behaviours and patterns.
Acquisition – All Traffic – Channels
Next you’ll want to have a look at where the people are coming from. As you can see on the left, traffic on this website was mainly driven by organic search, second was direct traffic from people whom either typed in the URL or had it saved as a bookmark. Third was from social. You can drill into each channel for greater detail. Is more social traffic coming from Facebook or Instagram?
With this statistic, it can help guide your marketing approaches. Should you do more Search Engine Optimisation to increase even more organic search or should you run a Facebook campaign to drive more traffic from social? From the above numbers, there is definitely a lot of opportunities to increase social following and in turn get more website visits from social media.
Behaviour – Site Content – All Pages
You’ll also want to find out the most popular pages that your visitors are going into. Are people seeing the promotion’s page or are they spending more time on the About Us page? It’s always worthwhile looking at the average time spent on page and bounce rate (people visiting the page without browsing any other page and leaving your website) to assess if the right people are visiting your website and/or if you’re providing relevant information.
Behaviour – Events – Overview
If you have PDF fact sheets or something that your customers can download, you’ll want to track the number of times it has been downloaded. You’ll first need to setup each individual item with an event tag within Google Analytics (more details on this in a later post). Once that is setup, you’ll be able to view the number of downloads/action that has been undertaken.
Conversions
Whether you have an E-Commerce website or not, you’ll want to setup goals and conversions on your website. This will allow you to quickly look at the numbers that meet a particular goal that you’ve sets. You can set goals such as, number of people who viewed more than 3 pages or number of people that submitted a quote request. For example, if you know how much each request for a quotation is worth to your business, you’ll be able to calculate the value of each lead online.
Who are your audience?
Who is your audience? What do they like? What time do they visit your website? If you know the answers to questions such as this, you’ll be able to plan a marketing strategy that will be effective and targeted. Under the Audience section of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to find out the answer to these questions and more.
Some things that you will be able to find out include:
- Demographics: Age, Gender
- Interests: What your audience is interested in, music? Sport?
- Location and Language: City and language they use to browse the web
- Behaviour: New visitor vs Returning visitor, how often they visit and for how long
- Technology: What internet browser are they using and what Operating System (eg Windows, Android, IOS)
- Mobile: What device are they using to browse your website. E.g. Mobile, Desktop or Tablet?
I hope this gives you an introduction to the power of Google Analytics; we’ve only skimmed the surface and in our upcoming posts we’ll drill down further into the more complex functions that can be used within Google and various social media platforms. Our main aim is to help your business succeed and grow, so hopefully this helps that little bit.
If you have any questions or need assistance with your Google Analytics, do drop us a line.