Posted by Maya Pillai

These days, nearly all small and medium-sized businesses have an Internet presence. Keeping in constant touch with your potential or loyal customers is mandatory if you want to propel your business forward. With a click of a mouse, virtually anyone can get information they are seeking with a simple search engine. Apart from that, a website is accessible 24 x7 for the customers. Therefore you need to monitor the performance of your website carefully to know from which demographic you get the most traffic from, how long the customers are staying on your website, if they are returning customers or new ones and so on. These analytics play a vital role in making strategic business decisions and should not be neglected. To make it easier, you can install a website analytical tool Google Analytics (GA). This is a free software from the search engine giant Google. However, the free version is very basic and if you want to have an in-depth analysis of your website traffic, then it’s wise to install the premium version. Let’s take a look at how the metrics provided by this tool can be used to make strategic website content and marketing decisions.

  • Audience location– You will know the geographic areas where your website content is reaching. Use this metrics to make decisions regarding the existing and new markets. For instance, if the metrics reveal that the traffic to the website is mainly from the areas outside the primary target market, you can make plans to expand your business to those areas. It gives an opportunity to expand your business to new areas.
  • Audience engagement– This metric gives an insight into how people many visited during a particular period, the duration of their visit, number of page views and so on. Depending on this you can alter the content to entice visitors to remain on the webpage for a long time.
  • Traffic sources– This metric will help to strategize your online marketing plans using the data showing the source of traffic. The metric will show the sources of the traffic which include organic searches, social media, direct traffic and referrals. Using this statistics, business should post the accurate content the audience is looking out for.
  • Bounce rate metric– The bounce rate of the landing page of the website decides whether your online business is a success or failure. Analyzing this rate can help you decide which page of the site needs improvement. The pages where a visitor never visits or does not stay for long can be revamped and engaging and relevant content can be added.
  • Funnel visualization– This is an important metric that the businesses should take into consideration to measure their goals. Funnel visualization metric reveals the percentage of the visitors who visit the website and their action taken. For instance if you sell goods or services over your website, you should be able to convert your visitor into a customer. Through funnel visualization metric you can find out the breaking points in the steps taken by the visitors. Thereby make required changes in the content to hike the conversion rate.

Analyzing the health of your website every now then would be good decision. You can review your online marketing strategy using Google analytics and make the necessary changes increase the traffic and have better conversion rate.