WebYell – User Guide
170 – Google Analytics
Prepared By: Peter Holroyd
Date: 4th October 2010
Tel: 01273 834506
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Overview
This document describes how to use Google Analytics in order to measure the effectiveness of the work you have done so that the necessary improvements can be made to improve future performance.
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool and provides some excellent insights into how the site is being used. This guide does not cover the entire usage of Google Analytics, instead it assumes that you are working with the standard reports, the reports setup by Webyell and focuses on the weekly cycle of reviewing performance and actioning necessary corrections for improvement
This guide assumes you have logged into the administration panel at
United-Services.webyell.co.uk/administrator
Details
Because of daily fluctuations any descriptions below refer to the weekly view rather than the daily view
Visitors
This describes the total number of visits to your site, how many pages were viewed and bounce rate
The key points we are looking to improve here are
- Visits - through our actions we are expecting the total number of visits to steadily rise
Falling visits (after taking into account seasonal peaks) is a worry and will probably require a significant focus of attention to rectify - Pageviews - we are looking for people to visit around 3 - 5 page views per visit. Visiting one page means the content is not for them, visiting a lot of pages means they are not picking up the phone to speak to someone
- Bounce Rate - we are looking for under 35%
Most people should be on the site because they have an interest in the products and services. Getting the bounce rate down reflects this - Time on site - this is a misleading figure. There is more about time on site below
Visitor Loyalty
There are marketing campaigns aimed at informing exiting customers so the visitor loyalty should be rising. In a 1 month period there may have been 1 or 2 news letter style emails. If these are working then your Customers will be clicking through to the site and becoming repeat visitors. You should be aiming to get the visitor loyalty up through this sort of activity and in turn get them to take up more of your services
Visitor - Length of Visit
This statistic is much more informative than the visitor time on site above. You will find that many people are on the site for hours at a time, which in turn completely distorts the average time on site. The aim is to get the % of people on for < 10 seconds down. At the time of writing this is 58% and a more realistic figure is somewhere around 40% - 45%. As the bounce rate falls the length of visit will increase.
Visitor - Pageviews
The general aim is to get people to visit at least 2 pages. If the story they are reading is engaging then they will want to find out more and hopefully pick up the phone to speak to someone at head office
The target for pageviews is to get the number of single page views down to under 33%.
Mobile Devices
At the present the percentage of visits from mobiles is around 0.5% of all visits. I have other sites where mobile visits are nearer 5% of all visits and they are quality visits. If the number of mobile visits rise significantly then you will need to consider developing a site specifically for mobiles
Traffic Sources
The main traffic figures is the split between search engines, direct and referred.
The search engine traffic needs to be monitored to see if another search engine, such as Bing or Yahoo starts to drive a significant percentage of your traffic. If they do then more attention will need to be given to these engines in an attempt to drive more traffic
Direct traffic means the user has keyed your details into the address bar of their browser of clicked a bookmark etc
Having direct traffic is good as it means people are book marking the site or key the url in directly.
Referring sites needs the most attention. If sites are providing you with good referrals then you clearly want more of a good thing. This can mean covering other subjects with these people or continuing to provide them with press releases etc. Clicking onto each referral site will show you the links back to your site.
Keywords
This is one of the key elements of Google analytics. You will see the keywords people are arriving at the site on broken down into the following categories
- Brand awareness
The user knows United Services and has entered something like United Services into the search box to find you
It is good to have a high brand awareness - Keyword such as Washroom Service
Main keywords NOT appearing here is a worry. This means you are either not appearing in the Google list or people are not clicking through to the site. The action here is to revisit the site to check your keyword content and to check you have quality backlinks on this term.
Adwords
This screen allows you to monitor the success of your campaigns, keyword effectiveness and click through rates.
Campaigns should be run in conjunction with your natural search optimisation. Driving more traffic to your site during the campaign will spill over into your natural search rankings. Once the campaign has finished you should be looking to have a higher number of daily visitors than before it started. This way you gain additional benefit to the money invested in the pay per click campaigns
Attention should be given to the Keyword positions. If a keyword is not seen to be relevant to your site, that is it yields a high bounce rate, then your ad placements will suffer as a result. Continue to check the relevance of the adwords you are paying for
Content
My favourite part of this sub menu is the site overlay. It provides a 30 second view of a page and shows you exactly where people are clicking on that page. If menu items or hyperlinks are not being clicked on then you shold consider removing them
This view only works if the page being viewed remains unchanged.
Top landing - top exit pages
Every site naturally has exit pages. All being well these are the pages that get people to call into the business for more information, or fill out a web enquiry form
Exit pages should not be key pages such as Washroom Services. If a key page starts to becomes an exit page then go back to reconsider how that page is presenting itself to the user through its title, headings and content.
Event Tracking
Event tracking is implemented by Webyell into the HTML of each page. Events are set up to report back to Google analytics things such as clicking on the web enquiry button, call me back button etc.
Once these items have been plumbed into the site by Webyell then they will automatically start to show in Google Analytics
Goals and Funnels
These are setup under the account profile
A goal is a destination (page) that you wish the user to arrive at, such as entering the enquiry form screen.
Funnels are the steps taken to get to that page. For example people may arrive at either Washroom-Services.html or laundered-floor-mat-service.html. Either way you want to measure how many people advance to the web enquiry screen. This is known as funneling and you can compare the relative success between different landing pages and advancing to the enquiry screen