Understanding Online Statistics Personal Use Ebook

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Introduction

t’s safe to say that most people who are making the change to move out of the cubicle and into the world of online entrepreneurship have little background in marketing or technology. All they know is that they are tired of the rat race and want to be in charge of their own business. That’s great! There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur! And you really don’t need a marketing or business degree to be successful in the online business game.

But, you do need to understand enough about your target audience, including their needs, pain points, and behaviors, to effectively serve them so that you can make a profit. The problem with that is that when we move into internet marketing, we plan to learn as we go so we can get it all up and going fast. Then we find out that there's so much to learn that it can be overwhelming!

New startups can have a tough time keeping up with the demands of providing their audience with what they want. Too often we find ourselves trying all sorts of things to drive traffic to our websites to increase our bottom line, but we often miss the mark totally. Why is it that we fail with the techniques that all of the online marketing gurus say can't fail?

t is often because we don’t have a handle on measuring the results. If we don’t really know what is working for us and what isn’t, we can’t give our audience more of what they want. To retain and convert our audience into raving customers and site ambassadors, we must use and optimize the right metrics! Have you ever felt like you were just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks? We all have! But what you are going to find in this eBook will help you to understand how to measure the right metrics so that you can get more traction. It’s all here in an easy to understand format.

How Can Measuring Help Me?

Measuring the traffic and performance of your online presence can make or break a business. Analytics can do many things to help you stay in front of your ideal customer and to offer them things they really need and want. Without knowing this information, you could be spending time, energy and money marketing in the wrong places, to the wrong audiences, and with the wrong products. Here's a quick overview of what analytics can tell you:

Where traffic is coming from

How your traffic is converting

Where your traffic is converting the best

When the busiest times of the day and week are

What attracts the most traffic

What keywords people are using to arrive at your site

What types of copywriting techniques convert better

When you know these things, you can take much of the guesswork out of your marketing efforts. You will be able to make more informed decisions on things like:

What type of content to add to your website and social media

When to add it to get the most exposure

How to spend your marketing and advertising budget

Where you should focus more effort to get more targeted traffic and leads

What types of info products to create

What types of copywriting techniques and images your target audience responds to

What types of offers your target market responds best to

So basically, understanding your online stats will make you a more productive, effective entrepreneur! It’s as simple as that!

Bet you are ready to get started on figuring out how to gather and analyze this information so that you can stop guessing. Bet you also want to know what tools to use and what stats to look at. All of the tools available, whether free or paid, offer a lot of different numbers and data. You may have tried to use some of them before and simply been baffled by the sheer amount of data. Well, starting today, you will know what to look for and how to interpret it to make the wisest decisions possible for your growing business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that many people don’t utilize. Oh, they might look at it occasionally, but with all the numbers and other data, it can be overwhelming. Not to mention that Google keeps adding new functionality to it. That’s great! But, it can add to the learning curve and confusion. This leads to many people only looking at the total number of sessions and number of page views in Google Analytics. But there is so much more you can get from this free tool!

Before we dive in to look at some of the more important metrics individually, it’s worth mentioning a general rule to keep in mind. The Google Analytics Audience tab defaults to 30 days, so when you first look at your dashboard, you are going to see how you have been retaining and converting traffic for the last 30 days only. This is definitely a good thing to keep an eye on, especially if you’ve been trying some new tactics or running ads in that timeframe.

However, you should also look at the longer-term conversion and retention rates. These will show you how your site is growing and changing over a longer period of time, which is extremely beneficial. It can demystify where you should be spending your time to improve traffic and the behavior of that traffic once you get it.

There are three main areas that you want to track in Google Analytics:

• Acquisition shows you how you obtain visitors, how many you obtain and where they come from.

• Behavior tells you how visitors behave once they land on your site, including what pages they most often visit and how long they stay on your site.

• Conversion illuminates if, when and where visitors take desired action on your site.

Once you get more comfortable with Google Analytics, there will be other reports and information you will want to seek out there, but to get started, this is the most important data. For now, let's look at what metrics you should be paying the most attention to in Google Analytics and why.

Acquisition

You can waste a great deal of time and resources by ignoring where your traffic is coming from. The first thing to do to improve your marketing efforts is to go to the Acquisition Report Overview. Here you will see a summary that shows you the Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion (ABC) data for your top traffic sources. Here you will learn what your best traffic sources are and where the majority of new and repeat visitors are coming from, such as social media, referrals, organic search and any email campaigns This information shows you where you should continue doing what you are doing and where you can improve.

Based on this knowledge, for example, you might change your social media strategy for one or more social media channels because very little of your traffic is coming from that source. Or maybe you see a lot of your traffic is coming from quality backlinks. That’s great, so you know to continue putting time and resources into building relationships with other internet marketers or bloggers.

To see more details about each traffic source, use the Channels section. Here you will find data on how many visitors were new vs. returning, the bounce rate and how long visitors stay once they arrive on your site. From this, you can see if your ratio is too high in one area and not in another. For example, if your new visitor ratio is consistently very high, it means that your content isn't what your market is looking for, which means once they come to your site once, they don't return. This is invaluable information—knowing this lets you know you need to get a better understanding of what content your potential audience needs.

Tip: A good rule of thumb for the percentage of new visitors you want is between 15-20%.

Go to All Traffic to see each traffic channel's details. This will show you which of your content people are responding to the most so that you can provide more of it.

Behavior

Now that you understand where, how and how many users you've gotten onto your site, it's time to look at what they do there. You can find out how helpful they find your content by looking at these metrics. After all, it's not going to help you much if you are getting a lot of traffic but can't keep users on your site because you aren't offering what they need. To consider your users' behavior, you want to look at entrances, exit percentage, and bounce rate.

• License: Personal Use
• Category:Ebooks
• Tags:2017 Ebooks Personal Use