So you’ve invested time, effort and budget in getting your website live, but how do you find out how it is really performing? One answer is Google Analytics, a free and easy service offered by Google to help you better understand your online audience. It is easy to set up and is packed full of valuable information about how visitors interact with your site. Because of this, it has become the most widely used website statistics service, used by 49.0% of all websites (W3Techs.com, February 2014).
There’s a good chance your web developers will have already set Google Analytics up for you. If it isn’t set up, don’t worry, all you have to do is sign up for the service then enter a string of code into your website’s pages, all of which your web designers will be able to take care of for you (depending on your support package they may look to charge for this as an additional item – even so, I would be surprised if this costs more than £100 to set up as it really doesn’t involve that much in the way of coding/time to complete and the actual software/license from Google is free)
Knowing precisely what your website visitors like and dislike about your site can help you continually strive to improve visitor experience on your site. And a better user experience will inevitably lead to new customers. Google Analytics is packed full of data, but at a top level, I think the key performance measures brokers should be focusing on are:
Unique visitors: the number of people that come to the website.
Visits: the number of individual visits initiated by all those visitors.
Page views: the number of pages viewed per visit.
Bounce rate: the percentage of single-page visits to the site. The lower the better.
How visitors view your website: monitors the number of people viewing your website from either the desktop or mobile devices.
Understanding how people currently land on your site is important if you’re going to try and implement ways of increasing visitor volumes. There are four sources:
Direct: visitors who have typed in your web address in their browser. They know you exist, maybe from an advert or brochure and they’re looking to find out more.
Organic: visitors that have found your site through search engines like Google. This traffic can be broken down further into:
o Branded Searches: those that entered a search term that include your company name. They know you exist, probably through word-of-mouth or other marketing activity and they’re looking to find you.
o Non-branded Searches: visitors that entered a search term that didn’t include your brand, such as “insurance broker” or “car insurance”. They’ve got a need and they’re looking for someone to fulfil it.
Referral: visitors that have followed a link from another site, including those from social media channels, e.g. Twitter.
Cost Per Click (aka Pay Per Click): traffic that has been generated through following a paid link.
If most of your visitors are coming direct or through branded organic searches, your site is simply supporting all your other promotional activity. When non-branded searches and referral traffic is high it’s an indication that your site is reaching out to new potential customers.
The real insight in Google Analytics is when you start to compare the behaviour of each of these traffic sources. For example, if engagement amongst non-branded search traffic is lower than branded, it could be a sign that your site isn’t instilling a good first impression of your business.
Understanding how visitors view your website is important as it allows for a custom visitor experience on your website. For example, your analytics may tell you that Non-branded (needs based) searches account for 30% of your overall website traffic but the engagement of this audience is low. This could be for many reasons, but if you knew that 50% of these (or 15% of your overall traffic) view your website on a mobile device (Tablet or SmartPhone), the reason why engagement is low could be because your website is not mobile responsive. Meaning when viewing your website, the visitor needs to do a lot of ‘pinching and zooming’ on the screen to view your content, which can be frustrating from a visitor point of view, so much so, that they give up…
The benefit to the visitor of a mobile responsive website is that their experience is tailored to their device, meaning they can easily see your content, which provides them with the platform to be engaged.
I hope this brief overview of Google Analytics’ capabilities will encourage you to login and start monitoring your website’s performance. After all, it’s free and proven to work.
If however you would like support in setting up, or to assist with both the interpretation of results and what you can tangibly do to act on these – Ignition NBS Ltd (AXA’s Broker marketing consultancy) can assist by setting up a range of custom dashboards that summaries the data of your website and brand, into easy-to-understand insights. They can even set up email alerts giving a weekly or monthly summary of your website KPIs. If of interest, please speak to your AXA relationship manager about Ignition supporting you with your digital needs.
We would be pleased to talk through the options with you, give us a call on 0161 831 7199.