Greg’s problem was all too common. He had traffic, and he was getting good leads through his website, but what he didn’t have was any idea where his top leads were coming from. He had worked hard to increase the traffic coming to his website and his efforts had finally paid off. Now it was time to focus on streamlining his website marketing efforts and cut out all the stuff that wasn’t paying off. Without knowing where his best leads were coming from, he didn’t know where to start. He knew that trying to figure it out by trial and error would be costly in both time and money, and he knew deep inside that there had to be a better way. Let’s take a look at how you can see where your most valuable website traffic is coming from.
Web analytics reports don’t have to be confusing
Website Analytics Made Easy
Most website analytics reports are all wrong. I don’t mean that the numbers are inaccurate, I mean that they present lots of details and pieces of information that are at best interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, but are next to useless when it comes to making real world decisions.
For example, it may be interesting to know that you had 987 people visit your website, but what do you do with that information? In order to be meaningful, the information in your analytics reports needs to be tied to questions that you need the answers to.
Making website analytics easy is really all about making sure that your reports contain the key pieces of information that give you the real insight you need to make smart decisions. It is about making sure that your reports aren’t cluttered up with a bunch of distracting information.
Simplify Your Website Analytics Reports
The key to simplifying your website analytics reports is to focus on building your reports around the questions that you need to answer. Reports are most useful and intuitive to review when they are built around providing you with the answer to one or two questions. When reports contain much more than that, they tend to be cluttered and confusing for most people who don’t have a lot of time to spend poring over reports.
Questions such as, “Where are my most valuable leads coming from?” can easily be answered with Google Analytics Custom Reports. The first step is to define what your most valuable leads look like. Do they fill out a particular web form or download a particular document? Do they make an online purchase? Do they join your list? In Greg’s case, his most valuable leads filled out a particular web form on his website. The other traffic on his site, was nice, but he was most interested in the people filling out one of his web forms. Once you know how to define your most valuable leads, then it is just a matter of setting up “goals” in Google Analytics to correspond to your definition.
Discovering your most valuable source of traffic becomes easy once your goals are properly configured. With your goals in place, Google Analytics Custom Reports can be set to show you how much goal activity is taking place and which sources of traffic are driving your goal activity. Once Greg was able to see where his most valuable leads were coming from, it was easy for him to streamline his marketing efforts without reducing the amount of good leads his site brings in.
