Get the most from your Data

Acquisition, engagement, and outcome are important aspects of creating a marketing and public relations strategy for your company and your website. You have to begin with a plan, but once you obtain results, how do you know where to start with deciphering those analytics? Many people know that they can use Google Analytics to their advantage, but they don't know what they should be looking for.

The goal of having a website is to engage customers and potential clients, right? You want to be able to drive a client to your website, but once they get there, what is going to compel them to stay? You can probably think of a few things that will drive you away from returning to a website, whether it is a flashy pop up, or an advertisement with loud music. There is nothing more annoying than a website that has 15 advertisements pop up before you even get to the homepage. If that's the case, I will most likely not be a returning visitor to that site.

In gaining engagement, you have to consider the ideas, organization, and visual elements that make your customers feel like they can depend on your website for valuable information from a reliable source. Once you have a good visual aspect, and your site seems generally easy to navigate, you might want to start monitoring your site traffic in order to see where you can make improvements.

Google metrics can seem a little confusing at first, but mashable.com has broken down the three main statistics:

"The three key engagement metrics in Google Analytics are:

• Pages per Visit: This is the average number of pages a visitor views when coming to your website. The more engaging your site is, the more inclined visitors will be to continue clicking beyond the entry page.
• Average Time on Site: This refers to the typical amount of time visitors spend on your site, despite whether they continue to stay on the page they came in on or navigate elsewhere within your domain.
• Bounce Rate: This represents the percentage of single-page visits to your site. It gives you a sense of how many visitors left your site from the entrance page rather than clicking further into your site as compared to total visitors. Like Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate can help you determine the performance of your entry pages based on the actions visitors take (or don’t take) after they’ve arrived on your site."

You can then use these tools to decide if your website is user-friendly, or if you need improvement on the links that navigate through your website. Take into consideration a few questions: is the content on your site is useful to the customer, and does the content on a specific page match the keywords in the links provided? Using these questions and numbers in sync can be a surefire way to improve the quality of your web traffic. Depending on your goals, it will be up to you and your company to decide which of these insights, metrics, and features are going to be the most useful to you. However, it provides a highway to strengthen your marketing techniques, write better-targeted ads, and improve keywords to increase customer traffic through your site.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/01/04/google-analytics-guide/