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How To Use Free Data From Google To TRIPLE Your Profits

Google search on Apple iPhone screen and Macbook Pro Retina display that is on office desk. Multi devices multitasking concept. All gadgets in full focus. Varna, Bulgaria – May 29, 2015.

Editorial credit: Alexey Boldin / Shutterstock.com

Let’s face it; most businesses have set up Google Analytics on their websites but then they rarely review it nor use it to laser-focus on their target market or understand their website’s performance.

To put it simply, how else are you going to drive revenue on your website if you don’t have a clear indication of who your customers are??

I’ve always been a massive fan of Google Analytics.

Why?

Because Google Analytics will provide you with extremely detailed and valuable information about your website and your actual customers and the best thing about it is – it’s FREE! Which is perfect for cheapskate entrepreneurs like myself because “free” is my middle name.

Now Google analytics may just be the best damn tool to laser-focus on your customers, but the reality is, there’s just so much information on it that it’s easy for most entrepreneurs who don’t use it often to get overwhelmed.

So to help out my fellow entrepreneurs find out exactly who their target market is and help them triple their profits, here are 8 essential ways to laser-focus on your target market using Google Analytics.

1. Use Real-Time report

The Real-Time reports section in Google Analytics will actually allow you to examine activity on your website as it happens from moment-to-moment. This report is perfect for measuring your audience’s reaction to a new campaign or piece of content published on your website.

Keep in mind that your website would only qualify for the Real-Time reports section if it has activated an event or pageview within the past 5 minutes. To view your website’s Real-Time reports data, head to the Reporting tab and select Real-Time from the left-hand report navigation column as per below. The report is divided into six sections.

Overview

The Overview section is the big picture of the current activity on your website. Such as how many visitors your website has at the moment, which pages are they reading,  what’s your top traffic sources and what country your active users based in.

Locations

The Locations report lets you know which countries your active visitors are from. You can actually filter your data by country by either clicking one of the options in the list or on one of the points on the map.

Traffic Sources

The Traffic Sources report will help you determine what websites your current visitors are coming from. The detailed data is organized by Medium, Source and the number of active visitors from each one.

Content

The Content report demonstrates which actual pages your current visitors are spending time on, which includes the page URL, the page title and the percent of active visitors that are on each page.

Events

The Events report allows businesses to create custom events for the purpose of interactions on their website, which includes button clicks, downloads, video plays and ad clicks.

Conversions

The Conversions report will give you an indication of which goals active users are completing. You’ll be able to find out the total number and percentage of active users who have completed a goal.

2. Create Goals

Here’s the definition of Goals according to Google Analytics:

“Goals measure how well your site or app fulfils your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an e-commerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

“Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. Having properly configured goals allows Analytics to provide you with critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site or app. Without this information, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns.”

Basically, the Google Analytics goals measures how and when people complete specific actions that you want them to complete. Once you’ve created a goal you can then start measuring the Google Analytics data against your goals. If your data is looking good, then obviously you’re successfully achieving your goals.

3. Find out your highest performing keywords

For the newbies out there, keywords are vital for every website as they actually drive targeted traffic to your website for free. In a nutshell, keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into the search box of a search engine like Google to find out what websites match what they are looking for.

Discovering your highest performing keywords is very important to the success of your website because it’ll help you figure out what people are searching to find you, you can take advantage of those keywords to reach a wider audience.

To find out what your best performing keywords are, you need to go to Acquisition > Overview and keep scrolling down until you see this:

You need to then click on “Organic Search”

and then keep scrolling down until you see this Keyword box and there you have it – you’ve just identified the top performing keywords that are driving traffic to your website.

4. Know your audience’s demographics

Did you know that Google Analytics can give you a detailed look at the age and gender ranges of your audience?

All you have to do is navigate to Audience > Demographics > Overview in the reporting tab.

You can also find out where your readers are based in the world and what language they speak. All you have to do is navigate to Audience > Geo > Location.

5. Know who your active audience is

The Audience reports provide insight into the characteristics of your customers. You can actually track active users for increments of 1, 7, 14, and 30 days, and by looking at this report you’ll be able to determine the level of user enthusiasm for your website.

6. Find out how people are finding your website

Google Analytics can actually tell you how people are finding your website. It’s got “Referral” which is a page that leads people to your website. If someone clicked on a link on a blog post and they end up on your website, that blog post’s URL would be the referral.

Here’s how you find out how people are ending up on your website. In the left-hand column, click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. If you scroll down you’ll see the websites that are sending traffic to your website.

This tool will help you determine what other websites are driving traffic to your website. Knowing where your website traffic is coming from can help you laser-focus on what sort of marketing strategy you can implement to make sure these readers keep visiting your website.

7. Figure out why your bounce rate is so high

Bounce rate is the number of visits to your website in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing the rest of your website any further.

Your website’s “bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who come to your website’s landing page but then leave without engaging with any content or clicking through to another page.

According to Google Analytics Guru Avinash Kausik it’s almost impossible to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything above 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is a massive red flag. Low bounce rate is usually an indication that visitor engagement on your website is good and of course, high bounce ratings is worrying.

If you want to figure out why visitors are bouncing from your website then Navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

Click on Secondary Dimension > Acquisition and type in Source/Medium.

Lastly, click on Unique Page views to sort your web pages by popularity so that the most popular pages will appear on the top then check the bounce rates for each page.

If you have high bounce rates on any popular pages then that’s a huge red flag because that usually means that people are visiting that specific page but they’re bouncing off because they are not finding what they’re looking for.

You can improve the bounce rate on your website by targetting keywords with high-value traffic,  great content, avoiding pop-ups and creating an amazing call-to-action.

Google Analytics is an amazing tool that goes into tremendous detail, with almost any metric you can think of. I’m a huge fan of this tool because it’s totally FREE and you can get so much insight into your customers online.

It may take you a while to get used to using Google Analytics, but as long as you keep at it you’ll eventually see the fruits of your labour.

Editorial credit: Alexey Boldin / Shutterstock.com