Once your website is launched, it’s important to regularly measure what’s working and what’s not, so you can adapt your strategy to meet the needs of your audience, and reach your business goals.

I know that many of my clients find Google Analytics a little intimidating and difficult to make sense of. But its an invaluable tool for learning how your website is working for your business and improving and optimising your website marketing strategy.

Here are the metrics I recommend you track (as a starting point) and how you can use them to help reach your business goals:

My website care plans include a monthly analytics report to help you review your website performance. Find out more here.

Sessions (visits), Users & Page Views

These metrics from Google Analytics give you a quick overview of how many people are using your site, how effective your marketing campaigns are at driving traffic to your site, and how well your visitors are engaging with your site and its content.

Landing Pages

Find out what page visitors landing on when they visit your site.
Use this information to:

• optimise your page content for results. Make sure your visitors know what to do next once they land on this page.
• find pages that are not performing well and improve your SEO
• find out what content is resonating with your audience so you can serve them better
• If your page views are low, you can work on optimising your most popular landing pages so that visitors are encouraged to spend more time in your site – you may need to improve the content, add links to related content or products within your site, or add a clear call to action …

Referrers

Find out where your traffic is coming from.
Use this information to:

• know where to focus your marketing. If you spend a lot of time posting to Instagram but all your traffic comes from LinkedIn … then perhaps its worth refocusing your efforts!
• learn more about your audience – knowing how your visitors get to your site can tell you a lot about where they hang out online!
• find businesses to partner with – finding out who is linking out to your content could be the start of a beautiful relationship!

Impressions, Clicks & Click Through Ratio (CTR)

These metrics from Google Search Console can tell you how well your site is performing in Google’s search engine. How often people are seeing your website content in their search results, and how often your links are being clicked.

Search Analytics Queries

This tells you what people were searching for when Google showed them your site.
Use this information to:

• Make sure you are being found for the right stuff. If Google is showing your site to people searching for something that has nothing to do with your business – maybe you need to make sure your content is making it clear what you actually do.
• Get new content ideas – you can find out the questions people are asking, and answer them on your website
• Find Search Queries that you want rank for but with a low CTR. Spend some time optimising relevant pages to increase your CTR – you may need to improve your content, article or page titles, and make sure your page listing in Google looks good by updating your SEO Title and Description (I install Yoast SEO on all my client sites which makes this really easy to do!)