Week 15 Part A: What We Learn from Google Analytics

Safari Digital's recent article "15 Local SEO Statistics for 2021" shared the following statistics with regards to the use of Google.

1.  46% of all searches on Google include local intent
2.  Every month, searchers visit 1.5 billion locations related to their Google searches.            
3.  86% of customers use Google Maps to find local businesses.                                       
4.  30% of all Google mobile searches are related to location.                                            
5.  56% of local businesses have not yet claimed their Google My Business listing.  (Mia Turnley 9/15/2021)

 In this day and age, any business who wants to connect expediently with customers should definitely claim their free Google My Business listing. Accessing Google My Business Analytics provides one with valuable information about page views, engagement, and conversions. 

Google Analytics Behavior Report provides information on how people view and move around your website. It contains data on page views, bounce rates, and time spent on the site. For my floral photography business this is especially helpful as I have a page devoted wholly to pictures of roses. Analytics will let me know just how interested viewers are in roses, and if a page devoted to one type of flower is a worthwhile endeavor. By seeing what interests viewers, I can add  more content that will appeal to them. I can also learn which page is drawing viewers to my site in the first place. Bounce rate information can point out flaws in pages due to keywords, content, and/or technical issues. Seeing if changes to these issues helps or not can be discovered by tracking bounce rates over a period of time. Knowing how much time is spent during a website visit can also tell me how engaging my content is to viewers. I know when I'm seriously shopping for a product online, I will spend more time on a site and often times revisit the site. 

Analytics Audience Reports provide data on the demographics of my site's viewers and what devices they are using. Knowing what time of day viewers visit can help me schedule my social media posting times. Discovering where my viewers are from in the world can help me fine tune the content that appeals to them.

Analytics Acquisition Reports will reveal the source viewers are reaching your site through. Some of the sources you can track website traffic from are: organic search, social referral, direct, display, paid search, and affiliates. Data for each source is further broken down into users, new users, and sessions. Knowing which sources are working and which ones aren't can help me focus time and efforts to maintain, improve, and increase traffic to my site. For example, if my new users number drops in the organic search source, I know to improve my website's SEO content and keywords. A low number of returning users means I should take a close look at website design, content, and functionality. 

The Analytics Goals feature is a really crucial feature for a business to track conversions and user activities. It enables you to to create various website goals such as destination, duration, event, and pages or screens per session. Using this feature will focus me on creating a number of different goals for my website and make it a more complete site. Having a fully functional site in turn will legitimize my business to random traffic that comes my way. It will also help me fine tune my website to be efficient. I know that I have abandoned websites that were difficult to navigate.

I can see that using Google Analytics can be both a daunting and cringe worthy experience to start. It provides an enormous amount of data for a number of variables. I would certainly take the plunge though to view the data, start adjusting what I could, and monitoring what works and what doesn't.