Google Analytics -- Week 15 Part A

 Google Analytics is a valuable free tool to determine how effective your business' online marketing is doing. It can be used to target your market and demographic and evaluate how well your marketing is doing. Your business can utilize this information to improve its social media and the company website. An important key is to install a JavaScript tracking code to each page on the business website. This will collect anonymous data that shows how visitors interact with the pages on the website.

As an accounting firm, the goal is to convert website traffic into leads. The data retention default is 26 months but it can be customized and is helpful for year-to-year comparisons. I would opt for "do not automatically expire" so I could track changes from week to week or year to year.

In order to measure and monitor performance, I would visit the audience overview.

•  The number of sessions will tell me the number of times that people visit the site.
•  The total number of users will show how many unique visitors the website is attracting.
•  The total number of page views is just what it says.
•  Sessions will provide the average number of pages viewed in a session.
•  Average session duration lets you know how long visitors spend on the website.
•  Bounce rate informs you of the percent of single-page sessions where there was no interaction.
•  Percent of new sessions lets you know the estimate of first-time visits.

This data will help to determine what visitors are drawn to and what needs to be changed or updated. 

Acquisition is another important element to examine. It will determine where the visitors originated from. This helps you focus on the areas that have the most impact.

• Organic search lets you know how many people found the website using keywords.
• Direct tells you how many visitors typed in the website's URL.
• Social will let you know how many visitors clicked on a social media link to the business website.
• Referral is when a visitor clicks on a link from another website, like the Chamber of Commerce.

I really like the Custom Segments feature. This is helpful to narrow down specific information. It can be used to determine what client base the website is attracting, the locale region that is relevant to the firm, and to narrow down the customer segment. It makes it easier to segment small local businesses that are in a particular age range or gender. Since a CPA is licensed in only one state, it can be narrowed down to state and region.

I think that all of these metrics would be helpful for fine-tuning social media feeds and the website. The bounce rate is the most useful to make the website more appealing and keep visitors engaged. It is also helpful to know where traffic is coming from and how many visitors are converted into inquiries.