If you are involved in e-commerce, you must have heard about Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a very popular, useful, and free website traffic analytics tool.
Why Should You Analyze Your Website Traffic?
This isn’t a silly question. If your business is running well, why analyze it? Google Analytics is a great tool that shows how your advertising and marketing campaigns bring people to your site. If demand exactly meets supply, analytics would not be so exciting. Unfortunately, very few websites enjoy maximum signups, subscriptions, and sales. Seasonal slumps, socioeconomic changes (like the COVID-19 pandemic), website glitches, and low website traffic mean most businesses can’t rely on consistent conversions. If you have more conversions than you can handle, it’s definitely time to expand your business!
Google Analytics shows how much traffic arrives in your domain and where it comes from. It gives several indications about what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
Google Analytics is a tracking code. You can use it to:
- See how well your website performs
- Compare the effects of different marketing campaigns
- Tell you who uses your website
- Tell you which devices are used by users to visit your website
- See which pages are optimized and which are not
- Indicate what content works and what doesn’t
- Find out what type of traffic arrives on your website
- Know how long traffic stays on each domain page
And all of this information is free!
Every time a person arrives on your site, the tracking code adds a cookie to their browser. This cookie stays in place unless the user deletes it. Until it is removed, the cookie collects information about how that user interacts with your website.
Is Google Analytics Easy to Use?
Google Analytics isn’t complicated once you understand the basics. As has already been mentioned, Google is a piece of programming code that tracks specific data.
The hardest part of Google Analytics is not understanding how it works. It is interpreting the data reports the tracking cookies provide.
Understanding Google Analytics Reports
When you sign into and open Google Analytics (GA), you arrive on your GA homepage. At the top, you will see four boxes:
- Users
- Sessions
- Bounce Rate
- Session Duration
Each box has its own graph that you can adjust according to your chosen time period. To the right of the Google Analytics home page, is a larger box showing Active Users Right Now. This is self-explanatory. It indicates the number of people on your website in real-time.
What Are Google Analytics Users?
You can see how many people (or bots) have landed on your website on the users’ graph. You can adjust this timeline to show the numbers of users over the past week or month. In Google Analytics, a user is the same as a visitor.
If someone arrives on your site for the first time, they are a unique user. If they return to your website at a later date, the cookie will remember this. The unique user then becomes a returning user. As you know, it is easy to delete cookies. Using different devices without being signed into an account can also mean that a returning user is not recognized. Even using a different browser – Mozilla, Chrome, or Safari – can mean that a returning user is logged as unique.
What Are Google Analytics Sessions?
A session refers to interactions your users take part in when on your domain. The default time is 30 seconds, but you can change this. If your user – unique or returning – downloads an ebook, signs up for a newsletter or even looks at different pages, he or she is producing sessions data.
If your website is interesting, your users will stay for longer and be more active. Your session numbers will be much higher than your user numbers. If your users only stay for a few seconds and leave, sessions will be nearly equal to users. You can’t have fewer sessions than users.
What Is A Google Analytics Bounce Rate?
The dreaded bounce rate reflects how many people click the top-right cross within a very short time scale or don’t interact with your website at all. They don’t even scroll down the page. If they did, this would be counted in sessions. A retail website wants the bounce rate to be as low as possible. It wants buyers to look at other products, fill in details, and make and pay for orders.
If you do not want to earn money from a website but just want to provide information out of the goodness of your own heart, a high bounce rate is fine. For example, you want to give the world a free dictionary. Every time someone clicks on a word they do not understand, they are taken to a page on your website. This page (one of hundreds of thousands of pages) lists that word and what it means. The user does not have to do anything. They read the word description and go back to what they were doing.
Because they don’t need to interact, these visitors are calculated as bounces. So a high bounce rate does not have to be a bad thing – it just means your users don’t have to do anything to get the information they want. If you advertise the price of your product at the top of your landing page, together with a picture of the product, product description, and shipping costs, your visitor knows all they need to know.
They will probably look around for alternative prices for the same item on other websites. These websites might make them search multiple pages to find the same information. Your website will have a high bounce rate, theirs will not.
However, if your price is competitive, your transparency may be highly appreciated. These users could come back and place an order. This will reduce your bounce rate. That is why it is important to look at how different data evolves over time.
The Google Analytics Session Duration: Is Longer
Always Better?
The short answer is no. Longer is definitely not always better. You may have very patient visitors who put up with slow loading speeds. Or slow readers. Someone may land on your page and then go to make themselves a cup of coffee. Session duration does not only indicate the length of visitor activity. The gathered data from all of your visitors can give an indication if certain content or tweaks to loading speeds have a positive or negative effect.
Traffic Sources on Google Analytics
So how do you know where your visitors are coming from? While this article does not have space to list all of the ins and outs of Google Analytics, knowing where your users come from is essential for any e-commerce business.
Google Analytics Traffic Sources divides users into three main types of traffic:
- Search Engines
- Direct Traffic
- Referring Sites
Your SEO investments are mostly responsible for search engine traffic. People search on Google, Bing, or any lesser-known search engine and are given a list of results. If your marketing department or agency knows what they are doing, your website will be right at the top of the list. The searcher clicks on your name and is taken to your site. Direct traffic is traffic that is hard for a cookie to figure out. Perhaps a person knows your website address by heart and simply types it into the browser address bar. They might have saved you to their bookmark menu. Alternatively, your email campaign may have included a link that sent them to your site. That person’s browser cookie can’t say for sure where this type of traffic came from.
You can use direct traffic data to determine whether an email campaign has succeeded or if it’s time to change some of your SEO keywords. Referral traffic comes from other websites, not search engines. Maybe you have a Twitter page, and people are able to link to your website through that. Or another website has outbound links to your site.
For example, this is an outbound link to Maxvisits – a website that sells web traffic. If you click on this link, your browser cookie will be classified as referring traffic. You’ll be referred to the site, where you can buy thousands of real targeted visitors to increase your website’s traffic numbers within a short duration.
Paid Website Traffic and Google Analytics
To look in more detail at your website traffic sources, you need to go to the Google Analytics Advanced Segments area in the Acquisition Overview.
Here, you can select up to 4 segments to add to the three generic groups described earlier. Advanced Google Analytics segments include social media traffic, mobile and tablet traffic, and paid traffic.
When you select paid traffic, you will be able to see a month by month breakdown of your paid website traffic. However, this only applies if your visitors arrive via pay-to-click websites. These include AdWords and website traffic for sale services that implement pay-to-click to send traffic to third parties.
When you use a paid website traffic provider that puts your ads on their sites, you won’t find that data here. That’s because these providers are referral visitors. They earn nothing by coming to your website. Their visit is purely out of interest.
When you pay for 100% human traffic from a reputable website traffic seller like ultimatewebTraffic, you can track the data they supply on GA. Your referral traffic will suddenly or gradually explode, depending on your order specifications. And as the best website traffic provider platforms allow you to spread your paid visitors over a period of 1 to 30 days, your reports will show you everything you need to know from the first week to the end of the month.
Google Analytics Shows the Upside of Paid Website Traffic
Anyone can use Google Analytics, and the tracking code offers plenty of data. You can easily see which niches provide the most conversions. Data per niche tells you who is most interested in your service or product. With top website traffic platforms, you get a broad choice of niches. For example, you can select up to three niches as well as three geographical locations with every order at Ultimate Web Traffic. Selecting a good website traffic for a sale site is essential. Together with Google Analytics, you will see the positive effects of investing a small percentage of your marketing budget in paid traffic. By ordering thousands of targeted visitors, you open the doors of your virtual business to anyone you want.
And remember, these visitors have made a conscious decision to visit your site.
