How to Decipher Buyer Behavior with Google Analytics

“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” John Wanamaker once famously said. “The trouble is that I don’t know which half.” Today, business owners and entrepreneurs share his concern, particularly when it comes to online marketing.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for assessing the efficacy of your website. You’ll be able to see who is visiting your website, where they come from, what content they viewed, and, most important of all, what actions your visitors have taken to further their relationship with your brand. If used correctly, Google Analytics is almost like reading your customers’ minds. Google Analytics is free and you can register by going to google.com/analytics.

For most business owners, the information you’ll find most valuable and relevant is found in the standard report. The standard report is broken down to into these five categories: audience, traffic sources, content, conversions, and advertising.

Audience

The Audience section of the standard report is all about your customer. This section breaks down your website visitors into sub-sections: demographics, behavior, technology, social, mobile, and visitors flow. This isn’t your dad’s demographic report. The web is still largely anonymous; Google Analytics does not allow you to identify specific visitors to your website. It does, however, let you pinpoint the geographic region where your traffic is coming from.

Google Analytics also tracks the behavior of website visitors while they are on your site. The Visitors Flow section allows you to review, by type of visit, how your clients experience your website. What page did they access first? This simple question can be a real eye opener—it’s not necessarily your home page or landing page that serves as your website visitor’s first point of engagement with your brand.

Tracking the journey from this initial point of contact highlights opportunities to increase sales. Are web visitors taking the steps needed to become customers? Does your content motivate them to explore further? Did they follow a path to a page that would answer their questions? Did they go to a page specific to the purchase of a product? This type of data can help you make improvements to the design of your site.

The audience section of analytics also provides insight into the technology used by your visitors. You can review the web browsers and mobile tools they use to visit your website. Taking the time to review this information will help you make a decision about the pace at which you integrate a mobile version of your website and see if you are losing clients because of lack of compatibility. The social subsection also shows the number of places your website is shared across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, email, and Google+. If you have been wondering if your audience is social when it comes to what you say, this is the way to know. If you have no social engagement, maybe it is because your website did not provide a way for the user to share your information. This would be the time to add this feature.

These numbers serve as a critical metric you can use to assess the current impact of your social media strategy, identify and capitalize on strengths, and pinpoint and remedy weaknesses.

Traffic Sources

While the demographic information provided in the Audience section allows you to understand where visitors are located geographically, this data section lets you know where your website visitors are online and how they reach you. Do new customers find you after reading about you on a high-profile blog, or is the spike in traffic attributable to your new AdWords campaign? For marketers who place a premium on measuring the efficacy of any given campaign, this is where Google Analytics shines.

Google Analytics tracks numerous traffic sources, including direct, referrals, search, and campaigns. You will be able to see what websites send you the most traffic. Use this information to assess the cost-effectiveness of any relationship where you’re paying for referrals. It may turn out that you’re receiving a large amount of referral business from a site you’re not paying for, a great situation that could be made even better if you take proactive steps to strengthen that relationship. When you know where your traffic is coming from, it becomes easier to increase the volume of traffic.

One of the most useful areas in the Traffic section is the Search subsection. This report analyzes both your organic search traffic and, if you’re using Google AdWords, your paid traffic. You will be able to see what keywords people clicked on to get to your website from both paid and nonpaid positions. This will help you optimize your AdWords budget by reviewing the key phrases that sent your website visitors to your page, and how they acted when they arrived. If visitors are leaving quickly perhaps that keyword is not the right word for your website.