Google Analytics has proven itself invaluable to businesses looking to measure the trends of website visitors and learn what they can about their performance and their site. These metrics are important to any business, including B2Bs. If you’re a B2B and you don’t use Google Analytics, change that now. But how can firms best utilise it and what metrics should they be using?
In case you don’t know, Google Analytics is software that records and assesses the activity on your website. This includes, for example, where your audience is geographically, how long they spend on a page, or how they navigated to that page – all of which should be considered as standard when you collect reports. This data is great for collecting objective feedback on your site, as well as for assessing the effect you’re making with your audience. B2Bs should consider these metrics essential, but they can also benefit from some clever, lesser-known reports. These are our top five Google Analytics reports, including some you might not be aware of:
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Demographics and interest reports
One of the most important reports you can get with Google Analytics is the demographics of your visitors and their interest. This report delivers data to help you understand visitors and their behavioural patterns based on age, gender, affinity categories, and more.
If you can find out where the majority of interest in your site is coming from, then you can adjust your marketing and content strategy to target more valuable opportunities. For instance, if people are clicking on a CTA or downloading white papers from a specific geographical area, it suggests there are valuable leads or potential new market segments that your business could target.
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Find ‘404 error’ pages
As you’re probably aware, 404 error pages are when the website cannot find a requested page. This is commonly due to a user mistake – usually a typo – but can also be caused by a faulty URL. There is value in knowing where your website 404 errors are coming from, especially if you’ve just updated your website and may have missed updating a few links.
Luckily, there is a way you can use Google Analytics to find all your 404 error pages, brought to you by Forthea. With this simple method, you can identify the problem pages and then address their causes. There’s nothing worse for the user experience than landing on an empty page and Google knows this so will reflect it in your SEO. One way to lessen the impact of a 404 error page is to brand it. In the event of the user making a mistake in the URL, a generic page will discourage visitors from trying again, while a personalised, branding landing page can deliver a more user-friendly message, such as ‘Are you lost?’ or ‘Let’s help you out here’, for a chance to retain that customer.
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Accurate measurements of content effectiveness
You might already know how to measure the effectiveness of your content by using page traffic and bounce rate, but they won’t tell you much about how people are engaging with your content. That’s where scroll-based events come in particularly handy.
Using two plugins for Google Analytics called Scroll Depth and Rivered, you can measure how far a user scrolled down the page. It does this by measuring events of when the user scrolls down a certain percentage of the page, including 25%, 50%, and so on. You can then find comparisons and correlations between data, such as between your types of user and scrolling behaviour, or the high scrolling activity on particular pages, and so on.
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Active Users report
Another of the obvious essential measurements from Google Analytics is unique visitors, but this data can be further analysed for more detailed information. An Active Users report allows you to measure your unique views over a defined period of time. On its own, this can be useful to measure the effectiveness of a particular marketing campaign in generating new leads, but combined with other filters you can get more out of it. One useful method to take advantage of this is to segment the results by conversion, allowing you to work out what percentage of visitors become customers on their first visit.
A B2B can use this information to work out how many views to your page you should expect of a user before they make a purchase or get in touch.
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User Explorer report
You can also examine the individual user behaviour of a visitor to your website for more in-depth analysis of a specific user’s journey. Having a thorough understanding of a user’s journey can give you important feedback on user experience and gain insight into behavioural patterns. For example, if one user has been onto your site more than the average number of times before buying, or if they fulfilled a majority of their order but didn’t follow through, you can find out what is stopping these users from finalising the transaction.
There are, of course, plenty of other Google Analytics reports that could be helpful to your company, but understanding what data will have the best impact on your specific business requires experience and expertise. Collecting irrelevant data wastes time and could even devalue the rest of your data.
At Dusted, we’ve been designing and developing websites for years and understand that all businesses differ in what they consider practical data. That’s why our branding experience goes hand-in-hand with our website development: because we look deep into what makes a brand tick, its audience perception of their brand, and the types of user visiting their website. With this information, we can definitively identify the appropriate valuable data to your business and use it to better the user experience, improve SEO, and increase conversions.
Get in touch to find out more about how we can help your brand.