Google Analytics can be a confusing array of charts and graphics, but they have valuable information. Here are just 3 of the charts and graphs from our Google Analytics we think offer some actionable information.
Google Analytics Traffic Acquisition: how people get to our website.
What the Totals Mean:
- Direct (Traffic), oddly means the source of the visitor cannot be determined because GA4 doesn’t have enough information. Not overly helpful. You can read more than you’d ever want to know about “Direct” traffic here.
- Organic Search is pretty obvious: it’s traffic that has come to your website from the organic Google Search Results for your keywords. Showing up in organic results is ideal, but to get there takes time and effort. That happens from keyword research and good on-page SEO. Watch this on-page SEO video we’ve creates here.
- Display means graphic ads that follow people around the internet. See the difference between Search and Display ads here.
- Referrals are from visitors who have come to our website from other websites. We put a “Designed by” link in the footer of every website we design, so that’s likely where most of those came from.
- Paid Search are the “Sponsored” ads that appear in Google’s Search Results Pages (affectionately known as “SERPS.”)
What we can do with this information:
The “Average time per session column” is important because it tells you how much time visitors are spending on your website, depending on how they got to your website. Knowing the folks who came to our website from our Display ads means those folks are more engaged. That tells us we should put more resources into our Display ads.
Audiences: who they are, and how long they spend on our website
What the information Means:
- Views per session is the number of pages a group of visitors is checking out. In our opinion, the “Views” should really say “Pages,” but who are we to tell Google what to do?
- All Users and All Users GA4: Those two seems to be the same thing, so not sure they’re both needed, but again, who are we to argue with Google? Anyway, this is the visitor count for the month of March. It tells us the “average” visitor spent 3 minutes on our site.
- Home builders (GA4) tells us that home builders are very interested in viewing our website, so we need to reach out to them. That can be done through “cold emailing,” or Display ads. When we send cold emails, we research the business owners, marketing directors, and VPs of Sales through Rocket Reach.
- Pages >2 tells us how many people view more than 2 pages per visit, With the average being 5.73. (Our math skills just aren’t good enough to figure out how that average works out.)
- Plastic Surgeons (GA4) tells us they must really be interested in what they see on our website. In our opinion, we’re suspicious the 22 minutes measurement is real. No one spends that much time on a website.
What we can do with this information:
The fact certain audiences spend between 3, and let’s say, 10, minutes on our website tells us we have good information on it. And we’ve spent a lot of time crafting content, so we’d like to think we know what we’re doing.
That home builders and plastic surgeons spend the most time on it means we need to continue adding blogs that are of interest to those two groups. We should also spent more on Search and Display ads directed to those two audiences to get them to our website.
Landing pages: which ones are the most popular, and how long visitors spend on each one.
- the > / means the homepage
- (not set) Evidently, this is a placeholder value when there’s not enough data to indicate the page in question. We’re not sure what to do about this one.
- /industries/home-builders (and all the subsequent pages) show these are the most popular pages on our website.
What we can do with this information:
Now that we know these are the pages people like best, we can:
- Expand on them by adding a video intro to make it more interesting, We’ve actually done that on the blog titled: How much time shoud someone spend on your website? Another page we create a video for is on a blog called “Which is better: SEO or Google Ads” and you can see the video here. We used Synthesia to create these videos which uses AI-generated spokespeople. We also wrote a blog about AI avatars for videos, which you can read about here.
- Set up Display ads that direct more people to those pages, and
- Use these blogs in our e-newsletter since we know it’s likely people will click on those stories. Those links would take a visitor to the respective pages on our website. Getting people to your website should be the goal of every e-newsletter.
A side note about enewsletters.
Your e-newsletter shouldn’t talk about you. That’s because no one cares about you (or us) until they know what you (or we) can do for them. Everyone wants to know what you do to make their lives easier, better, or help with their sales efforts. So focus on ways to educate people, more than boasting about your company.
We hope this information has been helpful.