Ella Tassi and Darlene White explain the fundamentals of Google Analytics – a simple but powerful tool for monitoring the performance and impact of your company’s website.
As a professional financial planner, you’ve probably had a website for some time. But the question is: how well is it working?
Google Analytics is a free online tool that can help you analyse your website visitors’ behaviour, thereby providing invaluable insights into your site’s effectiveness.
You can see where your site visitors are located, the devices they use and what they are looking for when they get there. All in all, it’s a great first step towards understanding your clients and prospects; insights that can help you target and boost your marketing efforts.
A selection of the most useful standard reports is outlined below, as well as tips on interpreting and using the information they provide.
Audience overview – information about the visits to your website
| Term | Definition | What does it all mean? |
| Visits | The total number of times your site was visited | You are aiming for a growing number of visits and visitors.Returning visitors are important because they usually represent current clients as well as potential clients interested enough to look at your website more than once. Providing engaging content and useful tools, such as online calculators, is a good way of keeping these visitors coming back. The ideal number of pages per visit is usually around 3-4, which indicates that visitors are sufficiently engaged to move through the site. |
| Unique visits | The total number of visitors, with returning visitors counted only once | |
| Pages/visit | The number of web pages visitors go through on a single visit, on average | |
| Average visit duration | How long a single user spent on the website, on average | |
| New visitor/returning visitor | The split between new and returning visitors | |
| Bounce rate | The percentage of single page visits, ie visitors who leave the site from the same page they landed on. This may indicate they landed on your site in error or, more optimistically, they instantly found what they were seeking and left. |
Acquisition overview – how visitors found your website
| Term | Definition | What does it all mean? |
| Organic search | Visitors who came to your site through Google or another search engine. Click through to see the search words used. | This information can help you make your site easier to find, using key search words that you know work.You can interpret the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by looking at where visitors come from and focus on these channels |
| Direct | Visitors who used your website’s exact address | |
| Social | Visitors who arrived via social media, eg Twitter or LinkedIn | |
| Referral | Visitors who arrived via other websites, eg online directories |
Visitors flow – visualise how visitors are using your website
This report gives information such as where visitors enter, the most common destination points and where they exit. This information can be used to inform your decisions about the structure of your website.
If, for example, two thirds of your visitors click through to the ‘Contact us page’ and then leave, you could consider placing your contact details on the homepage, making it easier to find. Remember: your key goal is to make the information visitors are seeking as simple as possible to find.
In-page analytics – show the percentage of visitors selecting active links on a particular page
In-page analytics enables you to hone in on a specific webpage, showing which links are most frequently selected. This data can help you to refine your site’s content and navigation.
For example, if 40% of the traffic is clicking on a specific hyperlink or hot button, you can conclude this is an area of interest (upon which you could expand) or a top task (meaning you should ensure its navigation is given prominence).
Ultimately, Google Analytics is just one tool, albeit a very effective one, of measuring the effectiveness of your website. It can’t give you a single measure of the level of engagement of visitors to your website, but it can provide you with a great starting point to tailor and target your website for maximum impact.
