Google Analytics 101
Three Ways to Use Google Analytics Every Day
Monitoring your website performance can give you great insights into low performing landing pages and high performing calls to actions. It can guide you on the right changes to make, and pages to optimize while also letting you know what is working well and what channels are driving the most traffic to your website. An easy and free way to monitor your website is through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a website analytics tool offered by Google that tracks and reports anonymous and aggregated data about the users on your website and how they got to your website. With such vast capabilities, Google Analytics can feel overwhelming at first. Below are three ways you can start to use Google Analytics every day. This will equip you with meaningful insights to inform your digital strategy and decision making.
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Check Your Weekly Users
You can see how many users are visiting your website in multiple places in Google Analytics but the easiest way to do this is by clicking on the “Audience” section then clicking “overview.” Once you are there you can view the number of users you’ve had in the past week and toggle on your comparison to see if this number has decreased or increased. Make sure you adjust your date range in the top right corner of your screen, toggle on the comparison feature if you want quick information on increases or decreases. Using this you can determine if you are up or down in traffic which can be a great insight when it comes to seasonal or competitive shifts in performance.
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Check Your Traffic Channels
Knowing the source of your users gives you even more information on how to maximize your website’s performance. When you know the channels that drive traffic to your website you can better see what investments are bringing the greatest return. View this information by clicking the “Acquisition” section then choose “Channels” and then “Overview.” Here you’ll find many different channels that show how many users they have brought in within a given date range.
Ask yourself, which channel is driving the most traffic? That’s a channel that has been nurtured or high performing and perhaps should be given more investment or could be replicated in different areas. Which channel is driving the least amount of traffic? That is an area that needs to be optimized further, note that you can click into these channels such as clicking on the “Social” channel and it will pull up the exact source/mediums responsible for those users such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
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Explore Your Popular Pages
By now you might have noticed the goal of checking your Google Analytics account every day is to gather insight on what to replicate and what to not repeat when optimizing your website. Naturally, the next suggestion when looking for this information is going to be exploring your most popular pages. The easiest way to do this is to navigate to the “Behavior” section, then click “Site Content” and then “All Pages.” Your pages will automatically be listed in order of pageviews so you can see what is being viewed most often. Ask yourself, what can you replicate from these pages to help other pages on your site perform better? Note call to action structure, copy density, and the placement of images on your page. Use those to inspire new content in the future while monitoring your website’s performance on a consistent basis.
Still new to Google Analytics? Check out our free Google Analytics 101 Navigation Guide here and sign up for our Cause Inspired newsletter to stay up to date with all things nonprofit technology facing.
Google Analytics 101 Toolkit
Whether you’ve been navigating Google Analytics for five years or the first time, there’s always something new to uncover. Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that helps you better understand the traffic to your website and your audience as a whole. Knowing the right buttons to click to uncover this data is essential to using it to improve your website.
In February 2022, Cause Inspired Media hosted a Google Analytics 101 session as part of our quarterly Education Series. In an effort to help organizations obtain and utilize our session further we have made our presentation accessible via a PDF that you can download using the form below. This PDF has sections that can help you walk through the important parts of Google Analytics rather than just walking through every part of Google Analytics. It also prompts you to ask important questions to yourself and your team as you navigate the platform.
If you have questions on how our team can help you maximize your digital presence using Google Analytics information or Google Ads then contact us here today.
