5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google Analytics

Building a successful website requires plenty of time and dedication. You must carefully curate and consider content, build a successful marketing effort, design a beautiful yet functional website, and perfect various technical concerns in order to please search engines. It can be hard enough to juggle all of these elements, but keeping track of them to ensure that they’re producing the desired results is just another item that must be added to the list. Many people use Google Analytics in order to keep track of their progress in SEO, marketing and a variety of other website-related functions. Whether you’re already using Google Analytics or are planning to get started, here is a list of five things you didn’t know Google Analytics could do.

Determine Browser Preferences

Not all browsers function identically. Some features or aspects of your website may not render properly for those using Chrome, Firefox, IE or one of the many other browsers. Thankfully, Google Analytics will provide insight into which browsers are being used by your visitors and which ones are most dominant. This can definitely assist in making precise design and compatibility decisions with your website that benefits the largest group of visitors, and is just one of many ways that website analytics can provide benefit.

Discover Your Top Drivers of Traffic

Website analytics can be used to collect information regarding which keywords, terms and phrases are most relevant to your brand. Not only will it do this, but it can also generate lists that show which specific queries are most responsible for driving traffic to your website. You’ll just need to combine traffic reports with this feature in order to quickly determine which keywords and phrases are most worth your time in terms of focus, and which ones can be forgotten in terms of content creation.

Uncover Who Finds You Interesting

In order to run a successful website, you need to not only bring traffic to your pages, but you need to keep them there. An increase in traffic means nothing if people are not hanging around to find out more. With Google Analytics, you can access information regarding your bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who promptly leave your website after arriving and seeing it. This can help you determine which pieces of content are performing better and whether people find your website to be relevant.

Find Out Who’s Mobile

There are substantial differences in habits between mobile and desktop users. Because of this, it’s important to know who comprises your traffic. Google Analytics makes it easy to figure this out, and it will help you to better craft a content/design strategy that appeals to these users. It will also signal indirectly whether your website is ranking well or not: most traffic to Google these days comes from mobile devices, so if your mobile traffic is low, then it is probably not ranking well in mobile searches.

Reveal Who’s Intrigued

Last but not least, Google Analytics can be used to quickly figure out who has found inherent value in your website and is sticking around to read multiple posts, pages, articles or product descriptions. This is effectively the opposite of your bounce rate: how many people are accessing multiple pages after arriving from search engines or a direct referral. This can be very useful and will shed light onto which pages you should promote most heavily (as they are the ones drawing the most interest).

How many benefits do you already enjoy from Google Analytics? If you haven’t used it yet but are planning on doing so, what helped you decide? Let us know below in the comments.

Published by Kidal Delonix (1200 Posts)

Kidal Delonix is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.