Starting with Macro Insights
Google analytics gives you a lot of data. It’s tough to know what to explore and what to ignore.
Starting with macro insights helps you figure out exactly where you need to dive deep into data. It also allows you to identify specific, actionable items that have a strategic impact on your business.
For Macro Insights, you need to answer four simple questions. Avoid getting into segmentation or any detailed analysis or filtering at this point.
1. How Many Visitors are coming to my website?
Measure visits to your website (sum of sessions)
Measure unique visitors (some of unique persistent cookie IDs)
For both metrics focus on long term trends and go as far back as you can.
Hunt for seasonal trends and other patterns in the data.
Make sure you establish a comfort level with these metrics and truly understand them and whether they are being measured correctly.
2. Where are visitors coming from?
Measure referring urls and keywords
Figure out which websites are sending you traffic and which are not
Develop an understanding of what you’re doing that’s driving traffic (relationships, direct marketing, other campaigns, affiliates etc) and figure out what you haven’t done that’s causing traffic.
For search, look for how much traffic you are getting from search engines. (In your referring urls report) and then dive deeper into what keywords and key phrases send traffic from each search engine.
Use this data to streamline SEO and PPC campaigns
Look for non-branded keywords that indicate you are getting prospects early in the consideration cycle.
Look that you are getting traffic at the right level for your branded keywords.
3. What do I want visitors to do on my website?
Step away from your tool and answer these simple questions:
1. Why does your website exist?
2. What are your top three web strategies (paid campaigns, affiliates, SEO?)
3. What do you think should be happening on your website?
Get business owners to agree upon all of these. The output in terms of your answers could be metrics, KPIs, or just simply a list of acquisition strategies for your website like SEO, PPC, direct marketing or even a mission statement that connects with your bottom line.
Pro tip:
Notice this is third in the process and not first, that’s because you need some context from your web data to even think about visitor actions clearly. In absence of that little data you may be lacking enough understanding of basic web reality to help you answer these questions correctly.
4. What are visitors actually doing?
Now is the time to dive a little deeper into data.
What you’ll be looking at:
1. Top entry pages
Identify the top 20 home pages of your websites and identify them as important entry points
2. Top viewed pages
A great way to know what content is being consumed.
Use in conjunction with top entry pages to develop an understanding of why people end up looking at what they do.
3. Site overlay (click density) analysis
Look at the site overlay report for your top viewed pages and analyze the click patterns for only the top 10 most viewed pages of your website.
This will help you understand navigational challenges in your website and gain a better understanding of user visitor intent.
It will also suggest optimization actions you can take.
4. Abandonment Analysis
You’ve surely created your first couple of funnels right now ( for your order taking process or for the steps it takes to submit a lead).
Check out the funnel steps where the highest abandonment rate is happening.
Visitor behavior there will identify big opportunities that will improve outcomes on your website-fast.
The goal is for you to simply get assimilated with content consumption and navigation behavior on your website and give you much more context and a rich understanding of customer behavior.
Caution:
The order of operations here is important. Its tempting to get started with conversion rate but its better to understand customer experience to the extent that you can, with these simple reports and then work your way forward.
