Using Google Analytics To Understand Your Website Users

What is Google Analytics?

In summary, Google Analytics is a free tool that helps marketers better understand their site's overall performance in a variety of difference useful ways, such as understanding customer behaviour, perfecting website journey and perfecting CTA's.

Google Analytics is arguably a crucial tool for any company to grow and succeed, as it helps marketers gauge what is working with their audience, what is not working and how to improve in order to be more suitable to their audience and achieve what they aspire.

"With a market share of close to 78%, Google Analytics helps website and app owners track their goals and conversions to understand what works for them and what doesn’t." Tagmate

Perfecting Website Journey

According to UserGuiding, Website Journey refers to the customer's entire experience while communicating/interacting with a website. It begins from the very discovery of the website and the reaches far ahead to purchasing/benefitting from the service that's being offered. The website journey should be clear and concise.

How to perfect customer journey

Perfecting website journey requires following a strict set of rules, with no unnecessary empty space being a top priority. The last thing website users want to be doing is scrolling through unnecessary empty space, trying to get to the content they wish. Most likely, they will either get bored of the website design or gain the impression that the company is lacking in whichever field they belong. Both scenarios would inevitably lead to the user clicking off the website and gaining a negative connotation to the brand.

Another priority is relevant content. It is crucial to understand WHO your customers are and WHAT they would like to see on the website. This is particularly relevant within the landing page.

"Vision Critical Researches show that 51% of the customers leave a brand because of poor customer experience, while 81% of them state that switching from one brand to another could be prevented by improving the customer journey and customer experience." Paldesk

How to analyse customer journey and awareness goals via Google Analytics

There are a few different steps which companies should that using Google Analytics, in order to successfully tracking a customers journey on a website:

1) Evaluate traffic: Will show you the goals which have been set up, allowing you to compare current performance and goals.

2) Analyse Customer Journey: Analyse how many users have added items to their cart (B2C). Analyse what pages are interacted with the least/most. Analyse how long people spend on the website.

3) Completion Goal: Track the orders which were completed + what is performing well. Furthermore, it is arguably more important to analyse what is not improving and take action to improving these areas of the website, in order to increase website success.

Gauge in-depth understanding of customer behaviour

Understanding your target audience is a key part of successful marketing and is important to important knowledge to have, at any time. This is why so many procedures are put in place to gain an understanding of an audience, such as identifying their pain problems (through joining relevant online community chats), their hobbies and their income, just to name a few. This is relevant towards website design as it is important to identify what content the user wants to see, what layout is most fitting for the user, and how much effort is required from the user when navigating the site.

"66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations" Salesforce

How to perfect analysing customer behaviour

As mentioned previously, analysing customer behaviour is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing and is relevant & useful knowledge to have within any type of marketing activity. Identifying customer behaviour uses a similar approach to analysing user journey. Depending on who your audience is, depends on how the website should be displayed.

If your target audience is young adults, between the ages of 18-24 (B2C), the website should be extremely visual, so engaging mockups, photography, or videos (one of my favourite quotes from a previous blog is relevant here: "If a picture speaks 1000 words, imagine what a video is worth." - imagen). The text should be very limited. Bullet point text would be relevant here as it is straight to the point, and only tells the user relevant information which they need to know. Nobody wants to be reading an essay on any website, this would only lead to somebody clicking off of the website from sheer boredom. Colour palette used should be bright and engaging, implying that the website/products/services are fun, increasing the chances of the user becoming more invested into the brand/company.

If you target audience is investors, with a highly respectable income or companies who you are trying to sell your products to (B2B), the website should be displayed in a very different way. The characteristics of the website should be professional and trustworthy. The content should clearly display the companies core and purpose, enticing the user to want to find out more, hopefully leading them to the contact us page.

How to analyse customer behaviour via Google Analytics

There are eight different sections within the "Behaviour" tab which companies should that using Google Analytics, in order to successfully tracking a customers journey on a website:

1) Overview: Often the most important page within behaviour section. Can see total views on variety of different pages. Analyse what pages are getting sufficient and insufficient views. Can see unique page views. Can see the avergage amount of time users spend on site. Can see the bounce rate, meaning visits that didn't lead to another page. Can see exit percentage which shows how often users exit from a set of pages or a single page. This is not to be confused with bounce rate.

2) Behaviour Flow: Tell you the path which the user takes when navigating the website. An amazing, interesting visual diagram to see what pages they visit, how they flow through, and where they exit.

3) Site Content: Important for bloggers and business owners especially. Allows ability to identify web pages that perform the best.

4) Site Speed: Allows ability to see important metrics, such as how long most visited web pages take to fully load, detailed advice on how to improve loading speed and how fast specific elements on the page take to load.

"40% of shoppers abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load." The Aberdeen Group

5) Site Search: Analyse how users interact with website's search box, if applicable.

6) Events: Used to track specific interactions on website, such as playing a video, clicking a CTA button. and downloading a document.

7) AdSense: Useful if website is used to generate income.

8) Experiments: Interesting feature which allows you to run A/B tests to improve a companies landing pages. The experiments feature can also help identify the elements which contribute to a better conversion rate.

Efficient Call to Actions

Arguably, the most crucial feature of a website is an efficient call to action system, as they encourage the viewer to have deeper engagement with the brand. This is applicable to both B2B, such as signing up to the newsletter, contact us, & B2C, such as follow us on social media, buy/download now). These call to actions should be eye catching and inviting, encouraging the viewer to delve deeper within the company and invest more time navigating the website.

“It is estimated that the CTAs will be read by 90% of people who look at a website.” Solution 17

If these call to actions are not obvious and eye-catching, undoubtedly the duration that the consumer spends on the website would be cut disappointingly short and their focus will steer away from your products/services, in turn losing a potential beneficial opportunity for the company.

What makes an efficient CTA?

Call to actions need to follow a strict set of rules in order to be successful and efficient. Below, I have created a table which clearly displays this.

The text within a CTA button should always start with a verb, such as download, so it is clear to the user what action they need to do. If applicable, the second word should be the subject, so the product/service which the company is encouraging the user to engage with.

Usually, the subject is not required because it lengthens the size of the button, increasing unnecessary required from the user, potentially decreasing the engagement and interest in the website. Furthermore, the surrounding content to the button should make it clear enough what the button is encouraging them to engage with. This content ideally would require less effort required from the user, such as relevant aesthetically pleasing imagery. Occasionally, a subject is not required because it is too simple and vague of a prompt. A perfect example of this would be "Learn More".

The CTA should always end with an adverb in order for the user to gain a sense of either how, when, where, why, and to what degree. In this circumstance, it is most appropriate to give a sense of urgency, such as "Book Today" or "Download Now".

"Relevant and well-placed CTAs increase revenue by 83%" Solution 17

How to analyse CTA success via Google Analytics

There are a few different steps which companies should that using Google Analytics, in order to track CTA's:

1) Setting up event tracking (using Google Tag Manager - requires no code): uses a custom code snippet which can be added to the elements which are needed to be tracked on a website. When a user interacts with this element, the code tells Google Analytics to record this event.

2) Find the data in Google Analytics: Find and analyse the relevant data. How many people are clicking on this call to action? According to HubSpot, email CTAs get an average click-through rate (CTR) of 3-5%.

3) Create goals for richer insights: Based on the data collected above, the company can make changes, where seen appropriate.

"Google Analytics allows us to look at our data across platforms - web and app - to understand the full journey of our user. We've been able to cut our reporting time by 50%. Sara Swaney, Director of Advancement, 412 Food Rescue