Agency Website Metrics via Google Analytics
“Celebrate what you accomplish, but raise the bar every time you succeed.” (Mia Hamm)
I don’t care who you are, where you come from, whether you’re an individual or an agency, or whether you’re in or outside of the insurance space…No one, no matter who, has the ability to improve without accepting some form of constructive criticism, realizing that they are not perfect; or tracking and taking advantage of where they went wrong and where they went right. How can we ever eliminate our weaknesses if we never begin by identifying them? Similarly, how can we capitalize our strengths if we can’t recognize them to begin with? This is why tracking metrics and analytics within your agency is so crucial, and today I’d like to tell you a little bit about tracking your website’s metrics in order to capitalize on your strengths, and push your weaknesses aside. You can develop your own constructive criticism by “looking in the mirror” when it comes to your agency’s website (which is your marketing powerhouse), but you need to start with some strong, quantifiable data, and that starts with Google Analytics.
An Introduction to Google Analytics
Just in case you’re not familiar with Google Analytics (GA) yet, I’ll give you a basic rundown. It is a service that you can sync to your agency’s website to provide you with data, and very accurate data, that will tell you about your website’s activity, engagement, the demographics of your audience, the geographical location of your audience, the number of users and how they behaved on your website, and more. The first place to get started with GA is to sign up by going to analytics.google.com. Once you’re on the page, you can click “Sign Up” on the right side, and it will bring you through a series of prompts to fill out with your information and your website’s information to get the ball rolling. Also, GA tracks your audience’s behavior, so you’ll need a Privacy Policy online that lets your audience know that your website tracks online behaviors. If you need a sample of a Privacy Policy to take a look at, then check out ours at www.paradisoinsurance.com/privacy-policy/. If you’re not exactly sure what you’re doing with writing a Privacy Policy though, seek professional help from a website designer or someone like an SEO specialist, which is who we go to for help at our agency.
Tracking Your Website’s Metrics
After you get things initially set up with your GA account and your website’s information is all synced, you’ll be able to start tracking data, and data that is incredibly powerful. The main metrics that it provides you with (right on their main dashboard when you sign in) is the number of sessions, users, page views, pages per session, average session duration, your bounce rate, and your percentage of new sessions on your website. Let’s talk about each of these metrics individually, but it’s important to note that within GA you can adjust the timeframe of your data measured in the upper righthand corner of any screen. After you adjust the timeframe you’d like to measure, you can look at your data accordingly, by:
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Number of sessions, that is basically the number of times your website is accessed;
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User count, or the number of people who accessed your website;
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Page views, the total number of your website’s web pages that were accessed by your users;
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Pages per session, the average number of total web pages someone visited while they were on your website;
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Average session duration, basically the average amount of time a person spends on your website whenever it is accessed;
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Bounce rate, that tells you how many people exited your website after viewing only one landing page;
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Percentage of new sessions, how many people accessing your website are visiting for the first time.
Data Driven Improvement
So now that you have the data in front of you, what are you supposed to do with it? Well, thankfully Google is very specific and detailed in their tracking, so we can look for multiple places that we can maximize, optimize, and/or improve our presence online with all aspects of our digital marketing. First, you need to analyze some of the data on your GA dashboard, as ironic as that sounds. For each metric that we discussed above, you can actually click on it on your dashboard and get a graph, or a visual representation of the data. Anywhere the data dipped down too low, you can click on the graph to get a detailed report about what happened on that day and figure out where you went wrong, to eliminate your weaknesses. Similarly, you can also take a look at each day or spot on your charts that your data was very healthy, and figure out why, and then replicate that process in the future to get similar traction or results.
As an example, if I had one day that had a huge dip on my graph of users, I may want to investigate that day. If I click on it, and I realize that it was Christmas that day, then essentially there may be nothing wrong there, because you will simply get less traction online on a holiday. But, if I click into a day we had a dip and see that it’s a regular workday, and there were no outside influences that factored into my data, then it’s time to look at our posts and content for the day. We can compare the good days to the bad to see which content or posts performed better on each corresponding day, and leverage our future posts to get more engagement online.
At the end of the day, we are looking to get more engagement in the digital world. More people will see our message and brand, we will grow a larger audience, and overall, increase our agencies’ ROIs. Figure out what’s working and what’s not, and optimize wherever you see the opportunity by having real, measurable data. As always agents, happy marketing!
