Use this powerful tool to find and understand your audience.
It may seem like an overwhelming task, but you can harness the power of Google Analytics to figure out where most of your Internet traffic is coming from, and how you should be targeting your ads.
Once you have logged into your Analytics, you’ll see a tab on the left-hand side that says “Audience.” Here, there are quite a few more tabs underneath, but if you’re a beginner, start with the one called “Geo,” followed by the “Location” tab. Skim down past “Countries” and “Regions,” and click on “Cities.” Here’s where you will get a better breakdown of the actual cities from where you’re getting traffic. These are the people checking out your digital storefront.
Where are they coming from?
You may find a few surprises here. Many stores automatically set a radius of physical locations based on how far they think customers will drive to take advantage of their services. But the fact of the matter is, people will go where they’re going to get treated the best.
People move, they make life changes, and they may still want to come to your store. Setting a radius at random doesn’t always work. If you go on Google Analytics, you’ll see where these folks are located.
Luckily, Google puts it in very simple terms. You can see city by city, where the numbers are coming from. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see you may have high activity in cities that you weren’t targeting. By diving into Google Analytics, you can stay on top of new opportunities.
Who is visiting?
The next place you should check is the “Acquisition” tab, followed by the “Source/Medium” tab. This is where you can see how your traffic is performing, along with who the top performers are. So you’ll see where things are coming from, whether it’s Facebook Mobile, Google Organic or Google My Business.
If you’re paying for social media marketing, when you go into the “Source/Medium” tab, you should be able to see that. You should also see what’s driving that traffic—you’ll see users, new users, and how that traffic is performing.
Who is sticking around?
Another number to check is your “Bounce Rate.” For example, if you’ve done a Facebook campaign that always goes to your website, you’ll be able to see how many people have clicked on it and interacted. If it had a high bounce rate, such as 90%, then it’s not effective. A bounce rate will show you how people are interacting with your site—if they don’t stay at all, then you’ll have a high bounce rate.
Ideally, you should have under a 40% bounce rate for straight website traffic. Sometimes, if your website takes too long to load, people will leave, and you’ll have a high bounce rate. If it’s not optimized and takes more than seven seconds to load, people won’t wait, they’ll just leave.
See the “Times On Sites” area, to see how long people are staying on your site. You’re probably driving traffic directly to maybe one page, so they’re not going to multiple pages.
These are practices you should implement about once a month. If you want to get more clarification, there are some good courses from LinkedIn, and of course, from Google. Just take it one step at a time, and you’ll find it’s a huge asset to your business.