Published on Oct 13, 2011
You may think you know your target audience as well as any business, but do you really? For example, do you know where they all come from? Do you have visitors from out of town or out of state? What about out of the country? Do any of these visitors stay on your site for awhile to learn about you? How many of them have never been to your site before? Even if you know the exact demographic of your main customers, these questions allow you to gather potential outliers where you may be missing business.
Of course, to find this type of insight, you have to dig a little deeper.
For example, this is the first thing you will see when you login to Google Analytics with the new interface (if you don’t know, Google Analytics released a new interface a few months ago):
Visits: # of times people visited your site (could include people who visited multiple times).
Unique Visitors: How many actual, individual visitors came to your site.
Pageviews: How many pages of your site did your visitors view on all of their visits combined?
Pages/Visit: On average, how many pages did each of your visitors view during 1 visit?
Avg. Time on Site: On average, how long did each of your visitors spend on the site?
Bounce Rate: What percentage of visitors landed on a page on your website and then left immediately?
% New Visits: What percentage of your visitors have never visited your site before?
These are all lovely metrics (heavy sarcasm). They are also very boring and tell you almost nothing. You want to know something about your business – for example, how can you learn more about your potential customers? The number of website visitors can’t tell you that; it can just tell you that you have more visitors or less visitors. That doesn’t help, not to answer this question, not in aggregate. You are looking for useful information that can help inform your marketing efforts.
This page is more useful to learn about your potential customers:
Here, you can see how many visitors came to your site from the surrounding cities. In the same top level report, you can also see the states and countries that have attracted your largest number of visitors.
Get here by going to Demographics>Location. Then, click into the country and state you want to view.
This page is useful for two reasons:
- Does your traffic mainly come from the places you expect, or are there surprise outliers (maybe you didn’t realize so much of your website traffic came from out-of-state, or a far-away city)? If you expected the visitor locations you see, then you go on to analyzing their behavior on the rest of the site (discussed in a future post). If you are surprised by the locations of some of your visitors (if they come to your site in substantial numbers), how can you reach out to those people?
- If you are a small downtown Portland business but you have substantial numbers of people visiting your website from Hillsboro, how can you reach out to those people and invite them in?
- If you are a larger business with multiple locations in Oregon, but you have a lot of visitors from Washington, Idaho, and northern California, how can you cater to those potential new customers?
- Looking at this report helps ensure that your business knows where your traffic is coming from so that you don’t lose potential business to your competitors; it helps you cater to your audience.
- If you just ran a major campaign to target a certain area, or have in any way been targeting a certain area, is it working?
- You just ran a television ad that targeted Lake Oswego – has your traffic increased from there? (You can change the date in the upper right corner to look at the past and the present. You can also compare both simultaneously.)
A fuller view of this report also reviews the % of New Visits and the Bounce Rate for these locations. In this report, these metrics begin to be useful. How many new visits did you get from that new area you have been targeting? How many of them left immediately?
If you have an auto dealership in downtown Portland and for some reason you have a lot of visitors from Atlanta, Georgia, they are probably going to leave your site immediately because your dealership will probably not meet their needs. While you may be able to sell a car to someone from Atlanta, it’s not your target market. However, if you have a dealership in downtown Portland and you have a lot of visitors from Hillsboro and they leave immediately, that gives you the opportunity to improve your site and invite the business. These are your potential customers; you want them to know you recognize them and are taking steps to make them feel welcome.
What if your business is in Portland, most of your traffic comes from Portland and the surrounding area, but they are all leaving the website immediately? Does your website need work? If so, what kind?
Make your customers feel welcome! Don’t leave them out in the cold and running to your competitors to get warm. They are coming to you; make them feel special. Give them what they need to trust your business.
And then you make more money.
