The 5 W's in Google Analytics Every Savvy Business Owner Understands

Who, What, When, Where and Why.

These are the basics of understanding your business .

• Who visits your website?
• What website content engages your audience?
• When are they viewing your content?
• Where are your website visitors located?
• Why did they find your website?

Savvy business owners look at Google Analytics to answer these questions.

WHO VISITS YOUR WEBSITE?

The Audience report in Google Analytics answers the who and where question with easily accessible demographics such as Age, Gender, and Location. In addition, you can learn if they came from a desktop or mobile device. A deeper dive into bounce rates can inform you if your content is engaging your audience. Pages with a high bounce rate could mean your content is not resonating in a particular demographic and needs some work.

The Behavior report in Google Analytics answers the question of what content engages your audience. Average Time on Page is a good indication of what content is engaging your audience. Time on page for a blog post indicates if your viewers are reading the content or not. A high Bounce rate can mean that the page did not move your buyer forward in the process.

WHEN ARE THEY VIEWING YOUR CONTENT?

Frequency & Recency in the the Behavior report provides insight into how often visitors are returning to your site. If you offer coupons/specials or publish content on a regular basis, you want to see visitors return on a regular basis. This is an indication that your content is valued by your audience. If you are running AdWords, you can click the AdWords report and look at Hour of Day. This provides meaningful business intelligence on when you should schedule your advertising.

WHY DID THEY FIND YOUR WEBSITE?

The Social report is a quick and easy way to determine if the time and money you are spending on social media is driving visits to your website. The Campaigns report is very useful in identifying keywords that attracted visitors to your site. In addition, if you are using an email client like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you can click All Campaigns and measure the effectiveness of your emails. If you are not using a 3rd party email client you can "tag" your emails for free using Google's URL builder.

All the answers to these questions are FREE in Google Analytics. There are situations that do require a deeper dive into data and setting Goals & implementing Search Console are necessary to provide critical Business Intelligence.

Please contact us to learn more about a deeper dive into analytics.