A deep dive into your website’s analytics will reveal all sorts of information about how your audience interacts with your company. Website data can can teach you what content converts leads and what drives them away, providing necessary insight to help you improve the user experience and grow the bottom line. Focus on these four website analytics, all accessible through Google Analytics, to learn what your visitors need.
Google Analytics defines “bounce rate” as “the percentage of single-page sessions” your website sees. Your bounce rate shows how many visitors to your site only see and interact with one page before leaving.
While a portion of your bounces may come from users who find what they need on the first page they visit, a high bounce rate typically suggests that visitors find your site unappealing, hard to navigate or lacking in necessary information. It’s an indicator that you’re failing to capture your visitors’ attention, integrate them into the marketing funnel and aid in their progress to becoming a lead and a customer.
You should look not only at the bounce rate for your homepage, but also for specific landing pages, blog posts and other, deeper pages to see how and where visitors are having valuable interactions with your content.
Some sites experience high bounce rates because their keywords are not well aligned with the content on each page, which frustrates visitors who arrive via search engines. Other sites have trouble keeping visitors around because they’ve failed to utilize calls-to-action in a way that helps guide site visitors to what they are looking for. Still others are lacking an understanding of their target customers’ wants and needs, and have failed to develop content that truly engages. Any of these problems (and many others) could be to blame for an above-average bounce rate.
Your site’s behavior flow report maps the journey users take through your site, and it’s a key tool for understanding the user experience. This tool shows the landing pages at which users arrive when they first come to your site and where they go from there. It provides a tool to visualize where users exit your site and what CTAs lead them forward as they progress through your pages.
Looking at the behavior flow, you can answer several questions about your site. Is the site optimized to lead users down the path you want them to take? Are they being warmed for a sale? If visitors are not going through your site on the path you intended, where are they going instead, and how could you redirect them?
Use these insights to improve the user experience by making changes to pages where users leave the site, or stray off the path. Improve the navigability of the site where necessary by developing a site map that outlines how you would like visitors to proceed, and make CTAs clear and easy to follow. Most importantly, make it easy for site visitors to find exactly what they are looking for, exactly when they need it.
If you have a search bar on your site, you can glean insights into exactly what visitors are looking for. The site search report, which shows the keyword phrases users type in your search bar, is a goldmine of data.
You should use site search to learn not only what people are looking for, but also what content is difficult for them to find. Site search shows you the content that is getting lost on your website, requiring users to resort to the search bar. Insights from this report may encourage you to improve your navigation, creating a clearer path to pages that users typically have to search for. And if visitors are searching for information you don’t currently have on your site, consider creating it in order to better serve your users’ needs.
One of the simplest ways to gain insight into your website user experience is to measure how long visitors are staying on individual pages as well as the site as a whole. Like bounce data, low average session duration suggests that users aren’t finding your site useful.
Optimize your landing pages to be sure that your target keywords and page content tell a consistent story. This will increase the likelihood that users will find content that addresses their needs and take the time to engage with it. In turn, these engaged sessions will be more likely to convert leads.
Using data to build strong brands is at the heart of everything we do at Movéo. Interested in working with us? Contact us today.
Photo by Apps for Europe via Flickr Creative Commons
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