I highly recommend using Google Analytics to log the action data for your website. Remember, you have to be keeping track of how how audience is reacting to your marketing so you can know what to do better!
Google Analytics Tracks the User Activity on Your Website
- One of the biggest things that you can do with Google Analytics is track conversions. A conversion is when someone takes the action you want them to take on your website. Google Analytics can track when someone fills out a “Contact Us” form, a “get a quote” form, or a shopping cart for online sales. You can even assign a dollar amount to these actions. This will reflect whether or not your marketing efforts are effective.
- One of my favorite things that Google Analytics tracks is the most frequently visited pages on your website. This is super, super important if you're doing a website redesign. When you are redesigning your website and trying to decide whether or not you should remove or change a certain page, you first check the Google Analytics to see how many people are viewing that page regularly. If it’s a highly visited page, you may not want to delete it from your site or change it too much.
- Google Analytics tracking code will track when people get to your website and how they got there. It tracks if your users come from social media, like Facebook or Instagram. It tracks if they come via paid Google Ad. It tracks if they come through clicking on a link in an email. It also tracks if they come to your website directly through search.
- Google Analytics tracks demographic data on the users of your website. It will tell you how old the visitors are, their gender, and where they are located. This can be particularly helpful in getting to know your audience.
- Google Analytics tracks each page visited and how many pages are visited. If someone comes to your website, and clicks on four or five pages, that's awesome because they're browsing through your site. It also tracks if they come to your site and only spend a couple seconds before they leave, which usually means they didn’t find it useful to them. We call that “bouncing off” the site, and Google Analytics tracks your “bounce rate.”
- Google Analytics tracks the amount of individual users to your site as well as multiple visits. A particular user could have several different visits (called sessions) to your website, therefore your session count is going to be higher than your user count. This is extremely helpful information to know because if a user is frequenting your site and spending time on it, most likely, they are very interested in what you’re offering.
Get in the Know
Tracking the user activity on your website can take a lot of the guesswork out of your digital marketing efforts. It can provide you with concrete statistics about how people are using and responding to your website and, ultimately, your business. It really is the key to transforming from awareness marketing to results-driven, conversion marketing.
People with goals succeed because they know where they're going.
Earl Nightingale