Understanding User Behavior on Your Website with Google Analytics

Your website receives traffic regularly, which is usually computed in 24 hour cycles to give you an idea of the number of visitors that had landed on your website on a specific day. The purpose of your website can be met to your satisfaction only when you are able to analyze the number of people that visited your site, how long they remained there and the pages they visited during their journey.

Google Analytics gives you all such information and much more, which helps you understand how well you have been able to reach out to your market.

This data is vast and keeps growing all the time but it is also vital in helping you understand the behavior of visitors on your site.

Critical for your marketing strategy

The behavior of your visitors from the time they land on your website right up to the time when they leave your site will leave enough clues for you to formulate a marketing strategy. This is a little different from the generic strategy that you had made before launching your business. Here you will know about the need to make changes to your website depending on the behavior of the visitors.

The user experience on your website basically decides the behavior of the visitors landing on it. For instance, if your site doesn’t load within 20 seconds, the visitor will leave.

A recent Google study has found that 53% of visitors using a mobile device will leave a site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.

Most website owners won’t like to overlook this kind of factual insight.   

General behavior of users visiting your website

You can get an automatically generated analytics report that gives you an idea of the number of sessions that every visitor went through on your site. It also gives you details of each session that a visitor spent on your site including the pages s/he visited, the events s/he activated as well as how s/he came to your site.

The main advantage of such analytical data is that you can design the click through action (CTA) that you expect the visitors to your site to follow. The settings offer different options to check out the traffic flow on your landing page, where it came from and what kind of events it triggered.

Types of visitors and their behavior on your website

You have the option of looking up the journey of every visitor that lands on your website. For sites integrated with ecommerce there is the option to enable tracking of the customer lifetime value (CTV). It’s important for you to decide the kind of information you want when referring to this report or for that matter, any report on Google Analytics. If not, you could easily lose your way in the maze of data. 

It is all about understanding your audience more deeply. Hence, you have the option of understanding the different kinds of visitors coming to your site, much better. There is a feature named ‘Audience Definitions’ under Admin that you need to set up with your preferences of the kind of visitor details you want, from a list. You will get details about the source your visitors came from, their devices, age, sex, gender and even the browser they use.

What your visitors look for in your website

This is something that every website owner wants to know and on Google Analytics it is a feature called Site Search Tracking that needs to be configured. You will find that it is quite simple to do. This is an extremely important feature of your website analytics as it determines the direction of your website content.

Unless you know what your visitors are looking for on your website, how will you know what content you must provide to them? Alternatively, there could be sections of your site where you have important content that a lot of your visitors are not able to find. The site tracking feature will help you find out about that and a lot more.

How did your visitor land on your website?

As a marketer, it is extremely important for you to engage your audience in the watering holes they frequent. It is somewhat like predators going to the watering holes to hunt their prey, which won’t come to them on their own. Similarly, your customers also won’t come to your site on their own; you must find them and engage them where they frequent.

The ‘watering holes’ are search engines from where the organic traffic comes, social media platforms or from referral sites. It is normal for the source of your traffic to be divided among these different categories of web platforms. You must know the break up to be able to develop a marketing strategy wherein you engage your audience at these very web platforms.

How much time does your visitor spend on your site?

We often come across the term ‘bounce rate’ which has different explanations for visitor activity upon landing on a website. First, it is necessary to understand the elementary meaning of the term – it refers to a visitor’s time on a website being confined to a short single session. Does it mean that your visitor is not interested in your website?

The answer could be a ‘yes’ in most cases but it could also be a ‘no’ in certain other cases. It is a ‘yes’ when the visitor lands on your website, does not go to any other page and slips out within a few seconds. However, if the visitor already knows about your site, and lands on the specific page s/he intended to, gets the information and leaves, Google Analytics will count that as a bounce but actually it is not.

Google Analytics is indispensable for online marketing and it is because you would be clueless about what needs to be done to engage the audience without data on their behavior when they visit your website. However, a website is initially made and launched without the help of any analytics since it comes into play only after the website goes live. That’s when you get information on the behavior of visitors to your website and what they want.