Using Google Analytics to Make the Most of Visitor Behavior

Monitor your visitors and increase your profits!

Last week, we discussed some methods for equipping your blog with analytics services that will tell you more about your visitors’ behavior. Today, I’d like t present you with some specific scenarios regarding how a program like Google Analytics could work for you. If you’re not using Analytics, you’ll see that you’re missing out on some seriously helpful information, and hopefully you’ll jump on the bandwagon!

Bounce Rates

You can use Analytics to determine what percentage of visitors come to your site, and leave without moving on to your intended action. Whether that’s clicking through to another webpage on your site, or signing up for an offer, you can bet pages with high bounce rates need to be modified.

If your click-to-conversion page has a high bounce rate, ask yourself questions like these – Is your offer large enough for people to notice? Do you give your visitors a proper value proposition to get them interested? If they should be able to contact you with questions, is your contact info clear, or is there an FAQ?

If visitors are bouncing on pages like a sitemap, it’s possible that you need to organize your information better. With more and more pages becoming optimized for Web 2.0, you’ll need to arm yourself with the best pages possible to compete.

Visitor Time

There are reports available in Analytics that will let you know how long visitors are spending on your site based on what keyword brought them there. This is as useful as a Google Adwords Search Query report in that you can use this information to help build out your negative keyword list in Adwords. If you find a visitor coming to your site with a keyword that isn’t relative to your content, it’s a good idea to consider making that a negative keyword in your Adwords campaigns.

You can also see if the average visitor over time bounces from your site when brought there with a certain keyword. If you see a repetitive pattern happening where users spend under a minute on your site by using a general keyword, you may want to consider changing match types in Adwords, or eliminating that keyword from your marketing arsenal.

Another useful way to use visitor time is to look at content placements. If you find that, over time, a certain site brings in traffic that either won’t convert or bounces quickly, you can exclude that placement from within your Google Adwords account. It’s easy!

Geography

Many people don’t consider how useful geographic information can be. Take a look at what countries, states, or general area your visitors are coming from depending on your market. If you find that a majority of your visitors are coming from one country, why not build a campaign or landing pages that specifically cater to that country or area?

You may also want to construct your campaigns built on your power country’s peak time zones, to get more converting traffic out of that country.

With so many useful tools available in Analytics, there’s no reason not to take advantage of all the reliable, and FREE information out there for your blog.