Without knowing how your audience interacts with your website it can be difficult to improve conversions and optimise.

Google Analytics

Every website needs tracking code to monitor traffic and performance, the most popular option is Google Analytics which has many features you can use to make improvements. Below are some examples of terms used in Analytics and what they mean:

  • Traffic this is an unfiltered term for all of the visits on your website.
  • Source source is where the traffic came from, for example the source would be ‘Facebook’ and the medium is ‘Social’ if the traffic was from Facebook.
  • Medium the medium which referred the traffic, for example the medium would be ‘organic’ if the traffic came from a Google search.
  • Channel is the type of traffic, this is generally broken down into 5 types: Organic, Social, Referral, Direct and Paid.
  • Conversion/Goal every website should have a goal or reason why you created the site. This could be a sign-up, sale or contact form submission.
  • Event these are created using onsite code or Google Tag Manager (GTM) and monitor actions on your website, you may use event tracking to see how many close a popup or click your call to action button.
  • Bounce refers to the traffic which has landed on your website and left straight away – a common bounce rate is 55%-65%.
  • Session these are recordings of a users time on your site, in one session a visitor may view multiple pages then purchase.
  • Users are the individual person who came to your website, 1 user may have multiple sessions.

Most people will only be interested in the number of visits to their website which is why it can be useful having the data interpreted then delivered in an easy to read format. A lot of improvements can be made to your website using the raw data from Analytics.

Google Tag Manager

GTM is an advanced tracking code designed to give your Digital Specialist more control for tracking without interrupting the Developer and requesting code to be implemented constantly.

With this software you can categorise your tracking and build audiences which can then be advertised to (if you are using Google Adwords). Below is an example of what this may look like:

You have 2000 visits to your website, 1500 have viewed a product page and entered the checkout but only 700 purchased. Because you have set events to record sessions that viewed a product, entered the cart and did not purchase – you have now captured an audience of 800 that you can advertise to with specialised ads.

If you are interested in having Sapling report on your traffic or setting up tracking, get in touch today.

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Phone: +64 27 842 3036

Email: jason@sapling.co.nz

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