Lesson Details:
January 31, 2020
Video Transcription: In this video I want to begin introducing you to Google Analytics this is the industry standard way of determining what is really happening on your site and you might have other analytics packages maybe through your WordPress maybe something else but this is the standard most recommend that it's given by Google it's free if I ask you how many people are on your site today and you don't know then you have to use this tool to know otherwise you have no idea or is there a million people on your site or is there nobody we have to know and what they're doing - and once you know what they're doing you'll be able to change your site to make sure that they do more of what you need them to do like buy things or go to the pages you need them to go to things like this you can come here through google.com slash Analytics will take you to this page and by the way they change design all the time don't worry about it if the design is different for you the idea behind this tool is the same in your case you would say start for free in my case I would say sign into analytics and by the way you should set this up as early as possible on day 1 of your website if you're new to this they're gonna take you through some steps to setup your website basically they're gonna give you a little code to verify that the site that you want to get data about is actually yours because they just can't give you a site data randomly they have to make sure that you own that site and they'll give you also a little code to put on your website the users won't see it it will be behind the scenes but that little code will be on your header tag of your HTML and it will help Google get data about your site.
I'll actually show you in a second how that code would look like but first of all if you're already signed in like me I sign into analytics this button if you're new you start for free when you start for free you'll go through a few setup spots but eventually when you sign in you'll see something like this see my website problem you know here and I've got real-time data on what's happening on my site and on the left-hand panel we have a lot of options because because you can actually expand these for example audience and boom it gets complicated quickly a lot of these are not that helpful what we care about here is acquisition and behavior first of all acquisition you go to overview and it tells you where your the people who come to your site where they come from are they coming from search you see or direct by typing into google your URL or social media or referrals somehow and you can tell actual hard data so like for example one day I had 267 people come to my site another day it was 228 and you can drill down and you can even take a look at the searches this is actually not as useful as before because your google webmaster gives you better search data so will come out of this for search data you go to google webmaster.
This is not really the tool so that's acquisition you basically tell hard metrics about your site you want to know how many people came now you know now what I really like to use this for is the behavior what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at behavior overview will be able to tell a little bit about what people are doing on our site and you'll see the most visited page sites so you get a lot like page views on which pages so I'll go to like let's say the most visited one and it tells us a few things right away about this page it's gonna tell us more in a second I'll show you how to get there but first let's examine this so we had 530 unique 585 repeat total so some are repeating what's interesting is they are staying on this page for a long time five minutes over five minutes on average that means they're reading and what we also want to look at is this bounce rate but the bounce rate here is deceiving bounce rate means generally that when they came to the page and they just left that's a bounce and if they came to the page and they went to another page on the site that's not about so a bounce is usually negative because they came they didn't like it they left now it could be because it's a content page they came to the page they liked it they got what they needed which is signaled by this five minute really staying time and they didn't need anything so they left because they were satisfied so you always want to look at the average time on the page together with the bounce rate but bounce rate is a little high here like ninety percent of the people are not going elsewhere on the site and by the way it can be also assigned that's good because if you have a link to some kind of a Amazon product or something like that so they leave your site to the Amazon product which you want because you want them to buy the Amazon product it will still increase your bounce rate if they go there because they're leaving your site but this metric won't be that good so you kind of don't take this metric at face value but do use it a little bit so you can get more data than this because there is just pull down here secondary dimension under more dimensions you have different types of things and I like to look at more behavior so for example what is there this exit page but where are they going so they're going from this page to sometimes they're clicking back on this page which is a little strange and I'll actually I'll show you why this is like this that it's business pitch and they're going exiting to business pitch here's what really happens on this page this is that page and this is that business pitch template so they get this and then there's a table of contents of this very same page so they can click it for example if they want the tutorial boom they go to this tutorial if they and it's all the same if they go or longer business pitches ok longer business pitches so it's actually the sections this page links to itself and if in different sections of this page and that's why we see this behavior here so people are using this a lot so now that you understand why that's happening let's get back to the analytics there's a couple of more things that I want to show you in analytics that I find interesting and helpful so that you can improve your site and so what I went to is behavior and I'm going to go to site content and I'm going to go to well you can say all pages or landing pages it might case that very similar thing because most pages are landing pages it will come to so let's say all pages what is going to happen is you can really look at all your pages and you can see why do some people some pages have like a really high bounce rate for example you see number 8 has a really really high bounce rate and number 9 also has a high bounce rate or above 90% is crazy too high right and this one also has a high bounce rate but this one I'm sending people directly out it's it's a page where I sell courses so what happens you go and you say oh okay.
So this is a clue like something is not good here although here people are reading a lot there almost ten minutes per page and here people are almost not reading anything so there's actually a big difference in behavior same thing here people are actually sticking around but you get these clues and then you go well I'm getting some traffic to this page I should fix it up because no one is spending time on this page what's wrong with this page is there a bug is it something like in the beginning poorly written how can I fix this quickly so that I get more engagement on the page and your goal is to have a decreased bounce rate and more pages browsed per session because more engagement is going to mean that people are going to read more click more ads buy more things eventually subscribe to your email list do more things that you need them to do so you ask me well how do I do these things how do I decrease the bounce rate how do I do this every page is different of course I can't give you a solution for every page but some typical things are making the text more readable make it more visual make it easier to navigate make it faster to load make it more interesting things like this definitely help your engagement right away so you go and you look at that page and you say well what's wrong with that page and if you can't tell as somebody else other people are very good at giving criticism to things that aren't theirs and this section of behavior in the analytics will give you clues what can be fixed so that's how I use it I use it for understanding which pages are lagging which pages are not performing and not converting people at a high rate to do what I need them to do and also I use them I use this a little bit for acquisition to tell hard numbers of the visitors but I don't look at it too much most useful for me is the behavior because I can tell if if something's not right about a page I can tell from that data and that question this is nice to tell how many people are visiting but over a short period of time there's not gonna be a major difference and so I don't look at it that much I only look at it maybe like a couple of times ever season like every once every two or three months but the behavior I look at more often especially if I'm really trying to boost a pages behavior like some pages that I have are very lucrative and they sell things and of course I want people to dig down more deeply in those pages engage with those pages and the behavior area tells me and gives me clues as to what kind of things I can adjust so that's how I'd recommend using this analytics.
Write a public review