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Monitor Your Business’s Online Success With Google Analytics

July 20, 2021

Monitor Your Business’s Online Success With Google Analytics

 

Google is one of the best known brands in the world, but did you know about one of their most powerful tools? If you haven’t already set yourself up with a Google Analytics (GA) account, then now is the time. As Google Analytics provides easily accessible, in-depth – and best of all, free – insights in to your website’s performance. You can find out who’s visiting your website and why, but you can also track your customers’ booking software journey. Read on to find out more.

 

Who’s visiting my website?

 

Have you ever wondered who it is that is visiting your website? Google Analytics can provide you with audience insights, including access to data such as demographics, geography and even interests. Geographical tools, such as where website visitors live, is extremely useful for targeting purposes. For example if you run an activity centre in Wales, you can see whether your website visitors are mainly based in Wales or England and aim your marketing at directly these locations by featuring in local papers and magazines that are circulated within these areas.

If you aren’t monitoring website visitors, they may generate low quality visits and it may mean potential customers aren’t accessing your website. Not only will this negatively impact your bounce rate (defined by Google as ‘the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page’), but it will have an affect on your search engine ranking too.

With the ability to create and tailor graphs and charts to display all or some of this information in as much detail as you require, GA is a flexible tool which can be used to fit any business. Once you’ve created your Google Analytics account, to find out who’s visiting your website simply select ‘Audience’ from the left hand menu and click on ‘Overview’ to get a general idea of who’s coming on to your site. From here you should see various other options, including ‘Cohort Analysis’ and ‘Demographics’.

google analytics demographic - Online Booking System

How do people find my website?

 

This is a question you should be reviewing frequently to ensure you always know the answer. If you don’t know how people are finding your website, it is impossible to track marketing efforts. Now your GA account is set up, to get instant insights about how people are ending up on your website click the ‘Acquisition’ tab in the left hand menu. Here you’ll find a whole host of useful options, starting with ‘Acquisition Channels’. You can modify channels, but it’s useful if you have ‘Organic Search’, ‘Social’ and ‘Email’. If you use Google Adwords, we also recommend that you monitor ‘Paid Search’ too. Use of these channels means you can see what percentage of website visitors are landing on your site from organic searches (e.g. typing a relevant turn into Google, finding your website on the list and clicking on it) in comparison to those who’re visiting your website through links shared on social media (e.g. Facebook).

 

Google Analytics also allows you to see what device website users are visiting your website on. In order for this to be fully beneficial, we recommend you optimise your website for mobile – something which we are happy to help you with. Even if your website isn’t yet mobile responsive, you can still view website users devices by clicking on ‘Audience’ > ‘Mobile’ > ‘Devices’. You’ll probably be surprised to see how many people are browsing on mobile and tablet devices!

 

How can I encourage people to visit my website?

 

Once you’ve gotten to grips with monitoring your website data, it’s time to start using the insights you have unlocked to increase your website’s success. Analysis of how people are finding your website is crucial to encouraging more people to visit. For example if you have noticed an increase in website traffic from social media, chances are more frequent, regular and engaging social media posts will drive a further increase in website visitors. Harness your most successful acquisition channels to maintain their performance, but don’t ignore others that aren’t as successful -focus on improving them. So if social media is your least successful acquisition channel focus on creating engaging statuses and updates to encourage people to click through in to your website.

 

Is it possible to monitor booking processes through Google Analytics?

 

Yes! With BookingLive and Google Analytics you will be well on your way to understanding your customer’s booking journey. You can find out beneficial information such as whether users are abandoning bookings and why this may be happening, so you can prevent it. The BookingLive customer booking journey can be tracked via Google Analytics due to its five step process. Each step can be analysed in terms of page views, click through rates and bounce rates meaning you can see how far customers are coming before abandoning bookings. From here you can set up goals, allowing things such as clicks on ‘book now’ buttons to count as conversions so you can track how many people are completing their orders. This is especially useful if you’re running promotions, as you can set up data to show the comparisons between traffic before, during and after the promotion.

google analytics audience sessions

 

If you haven’t already set yourself up with Google Analytics, we hope this information has been enough to persuade you! Without data it’s impossible to track the success of your business, or to successfully utilise your website.

 

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