Content marketers and SEO specialists are quite lucky these days, because they have a handful of tools and TBs of customer data to work on and create their marketing strategies. However, not all of them have been making use of these tools as effectively as they should.
As far as Google Analytics is concerned, in one way it can be a good tool if you focus on vanity metrics in this platform. The vanity metrics include page views, sessions, users and more!
Anyhow, according to the best search engine optimization company Toronto, vanity metrics is not that effective, in fact doesn’t offer value. In reality, content marketers should focus on actionable metrics to improve and optimize their performance. What does it mean? It means, you can use Google Analytics as an optimization tool.
Marketers can utilize this platform to make actionable plans of optimizing websites. It can really help in improving your website’s performance in terms of content, site structure and other aspects.
Listed below are the key areas that Google Analytics cover. You can not only get valuable insights, but also create a comprehensive plan in the lights of your findings.
Best Performing Pagesw.r.t Conversions
To start with, run and analyze the performance of your pages in terms of conversions. The report can be run using any channel and will help identify the pages with best conversion. If you’re an SEO analyst, you’ll be more keen to know about organic traffic.
So, it is recommended that you should run a report that analyzes performance of individual page during a certain date range compared yearly or monthly for organic sessions. With organic segment enabled, running a report can literally tell you whether your site is gaining authority for a few pages or all the pages. Have a report in the correct date range then filter it by organic segment, and you can see the pages that are contributing to organic conversions. In this way, you can identify negative performing pages as well.
Now, all you need is to create an action plan to fix the issues of low conversion on some pages. If there is only one page affecting negatively on conversion, you can quickly assess at the page level. If the issue is wide spread on many pages, then you should go further with technical SEO.
Mobile SearchesCompared with Desktop
Mobile friendliness of webpages have been discussed by a lot of blogs and experts. With mobile consumption increasing day by day, marketers should make actionable steps to optimize the experience of mobile audience.
But, you don’t only have to consider how many visitors arrived your website via mobile. You need to look at how they interacted with your site. You can run the report that uncovers engagement metrics of mobile users, such as:
- Time on page,
- Bounce rates
- Average pages per visits etc.
Keep it simple with the bounce rate on mobile devices.Viewing the mobile bounce rate by itself doesn’t provide too much context.
You can either view pages with highest bouncing rates on mobile and do something about it, or, compare the rate with that of desktop bounce rate. Comparison of the two different platforms will help you analyze the difference of experience, and you can easily figure out what ought to be done to eradicate this issue.
Get Your Search Data
There is a search report available under Behavior section of Google Analytics, which is often overlooked. To get this report, set up the functionality first. Then, Google Analytics will track the queries used by the visitors on your website’s search tool. Site report is great, because it shows
- Exactly how many times your search tool was used,
- What terms people have used
- What page they searched on
Of the three metrics within search report, search terms report is more beneficial, because it offers a list of keywords people have used on your site.
To utilize this information, simply create content based on the most used search terms. By adding more content around the search term will make your site more visible on SERPs in future.
Conclusion
Understanding analytics can be hard and it takes a skilled marketer to use the data to make informed decisions. But, with these things, you can always make a good start and utilize Google Analytics to good effect.