“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”
— Peter Sondergaard
High-quality traffic is the key to online business in this day and age. Every brand or service provider would like to see more visitors to their websites. But things work differently than that. Behind every website page, a lot of thought and purpose must be put in. Google Analytics offers a lot of data to make it happen for you gradually. All the top 10 digital marketing companies in India use the wealth of information from Google Analytics to improve organic traffic and ranking for their clientele.
Knowing how to navigate a sophisticated platform like Google Analytics is highly crucial in 2023. This article will explore 8 Google Analytics tips to improve your traffic and ranking. Let’s take the first step to move past the basic vanity metric reports with Google Analytics!
Tip #1: Integrate Google Analytics With Google Search Console
Syncing a Search Console account with Google Analytics does not directly boost your website’s rankings in Google search. However, the data and insights provided by the sync can help you immensely as a business owner. It allows you to identify and address issues impacting your website’s visibility in search results. Syncing a Search Console account with Google Analytics is something that a brand would want to take advantage of. Setting up and verifying the Google Search Console integration allows you to:
- Track the website’s search performance
- Monitor the interactions on the website
- Receive alerts for potential issues
Once the integration is complete, businesses can see search performance data within the “Acquisition” section of Google Analytics under the Search Console section. This integration lets brands see essential data such as clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position for your website’s organic search performance. You can also check how it impacts your website’s overall traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate. This information can be used to optimize your website’s content and SEO for better performance in search results and drive more traffic to your website.
Tip #2: Set Up A Custom SEO Dashboard
Setting up a custom SEO dashboard in Google Analytics can boost rankings. This provides valuable insights into how search engine spiders interact with a website. The dashboard can track important metrics such as:
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
- Backlinks
These performance metrics can give more power to the SEO strategy. It helps in identifying areas for improvement. Additionally, tracking these metrics over time can help measure the impact of specific SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize for search engines. Be it the best SEO company in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, or the world… They all use Google Analytics dashboards. The custom reports are generated quickly to view and share critical metrics and insights with the digital marketing teams.
Tip #3: Address Technical Issues Like Soft 404
A website’s “soft 404” error occurs when a page returns with a “not found” error. In this scenario, the website still loads content often. So if your website has a high number of “soft 404” errors, you can fix those errors and improve your site’s crawl ability. All by using the Search Console data insights. Sometimes, the website pages are available, but they still get the soft 404 error. In this case, Google considers the content to be thin. This means the page does not have relevant material or keywords to count as a valuable resource on Google. Here is how you can find the list of all the 404 error pages on your website:
- Step 1: Log into your Google Search Console account
- Step 2: Go over to Diagnostics
- Step 3: Then go to crawl errors
- Step 4: Click on “Not Found”
This will give you a list of all the URLs that have issues. By identifying and addressing technical issues like this, the Google Search Console allows websites to be more search-engine-friendly. The best tools, like Google Analytics, can help you with your digital marketing projects. This may help in improving rankings over time. This is a simple example of how the data provided by syncing Search Console with Google Analytics can help you identify issues and optimize your website for better search performance.
Tip #4: Track Web Performance And Page Load Issues
Google Analytics lets you see how your website performs in Google searches. This facilitates businesses to make data-driven decisions. To further improve your website’s visibility in search results, syncing with Search Console can offer you information like which keywords are driving traffic to your site. Here are some more things that you can track:
- number of impressions your site receives in search results
- how users interact with your site after they arrive via search
- how users interact with your site after they come via other links
Let’s say you run an e-commerce website and notice that the average time on site for users who arrive via search is significantly lower than for other traffic sources. Using the data from Google Analytics, a large portion of this search traffic comes from a specific product category. To check the underlying issue by reviewing the analytics for that category, you notice that the pages are loading very slowly.
There… you found the problem! You could use this information to optimize the high-resolution images and other elements on those pages to decrease their load time. As a result, you may see an increase in user engagement and a decrease in the bounce rate for search traffic. This can ultimately lead to an improvement in the website’s visibility in search results.
Tip #5: Set Up Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is crucial for brands in 2023. It allows them to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and website design in terms of generating conversions. For an online business, conversions can be purchases, form submissions, sign-ups, newsletter registration, donation transactions, phone calls, and much more. For example, if a brand sees many abandoned shopping carts, conversion tracking can help determine where customers drop off. It can help in identifying the pages or steps in the checkout process. This further allows the brand to make changes to improve the user experience and increase conversions.
Here is a rundown on how to set up conversion tracking:
- Log in to your Google Analytics account
- Select the website for conversion tracking
- Go to the Admin section, click on Goals and add “New Goal.”
- Select the “Custom” option and give your goal a name
- Select the “Destination” option as the type of goal you want to track
- Enter the URL of the thank-you page (users will be directed there after conversion)
- Set the goal value if desired, and click on the Save button.
Once the goal is set up, you can view the conversion data under the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics. With conversion tracking, it can be easier to determine which marketing channels and website elements drive the most valuable business actions.
Tip #6: Use Google Analytics Segments
In order to analyze specific groups of visitors, brands resort to good segmentation and targeting. This includes visitors who have completed a purchase or engaged with a certain page or feature on your site. If you were to create a custom segment, Google Analytics allows you to choose from the different criteria available such as:
- Behavior-
This segment is about visitors who completed a purchase or engaged with a certain page on the business website. It gives quality insights into the behavior of visitors exploring the website’s pages.
- Demographics-
The segmentation of visitors by demographics is very useful for all types of businesses. It records the visitor’s age, gender, language, geographical location, preferences, buying choices, and much more.
- Technology-
The segmentation of visitors by browser, screen resolution, or mobile device. This all comes under segmentation by technology.
- Date of First Session-
Knowing the visitors who have engaged with your site for the first time is a good piece of information. This segmentation helps businesses to appeal to the audience in the best way possible. This goes for both new visitors and recurring visitors.
Tip #7: Use Real-Time Reports
The Google Analytics real-time reports are important for all business owners in 2023. These reports provide a real-time view of the visitors active on your website. All the information, such as their location, referral source, and the pages they are viewing, can be viewed with real-time reports. This allows you to see the immediate impact of the marketing plans. Here are some of the things you can immediately track progress for:
- marketing campaigns
- website updates
- product launches
- other changes in your website traffic
Real-time reports also allow you to see what pages are currently popular, where visitors are dropping off, and which campaigns drive the most traffic to your site. Quick adjustments are everything! With these reports, you can make quick adjustments accordingly. If you are thinking about what else these reports can be used for, check out the following examples.
- Monitoring the impact of a new marketing campaign or ad
- Seeing the immediate effect of a website redesign or update
- Identifying and addressing any potential security breaches
- Identifying the presence of any bot traffic
- Tracking the progress of a live event or webinar
The Google Analytics Real-Time reports allow business owners to quickly respond to changes in website traffic and optimize their marketing efforts in real time. This can increase conversions and drive more revenue for their business.
Tip #8: Use UTM Parameters
The UTM Parameters are quite effective for social media campaigns or email marketing. They must be included in the top 8 Google Analytics tips to improve traffic, and here’s why! One of the most important benefits of using UTM parameters is that it allows businesses to track the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns. Businesses can use UTM parameters to track the number of clicks and conversions generated by a specific email campaign. They can also see how much revenue a specific Facebook ad generated. This information can be used to optimize future campaigns and to see which marketing channels are driving the most valuable outputs for the business.
The placement of these parameters is at the end of a website URL. When someone clicks on that link, the parameters are sent back to Google Analytics, thus allowing the business to see where their traffic is coming from. The UTM parameters consist of five different components:
- Source-
This records the source of the traffic, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, or Google.
- Medium-
The medium through which the traffic was generated, such as Organic or CPC campaigns.
- Campaign-
This informs the specific campaign that the traffic is associated with, such as “blackfriday_sale” or “newsletter”.
- Term-
This tells businesses about the specific keywords associated with a paid search campaign, like “smudge-proof eyeliner in India”.
- Content-
This tells us about specific content used to generate the traffic, such as “a banner” or a “link”.
The Key Takeaways
Google Analytics is a must-know tool for all businesses that want to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, identify issues on their website, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their efforts. By understanding how to use Google Analytics, you can gain valuable insights and drive more revenue for your business. These top 8 Google Analytics tips to improve your traffic will prove to bring you success in your next digital marketing campaigns. But if you still have any second thoughts, get in touch with the best digital marketing agency in Delhi.
With over a decade of experience in Digital Marketing in different domains, we have got you covered! Our services include search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, website design and development, and email marketing. We always tailor our approach to each client’s unique needs and goals, whether that’s increasing website traffic, boosting brand awareness, or driving sales. Get in touch with RankLords!
