With Google Analytics, there's no more reason not to measure!

Although the free tool has been around for two years now and not a day goes by without an article talking about the importance of performance measurement on the Internet, many companies still do not adequately measure the results of their site. Some still come to us with sentences like: "my number of hits has increased a lot this month...it must be fine!" ". You can imagine that we then have some basic notions to review since the number of hits is a rather inefficient indicator!

So I'm taking advantage of the launch of the new version of Google Analytics (a few months ago, it's true…) to talk about the importance of setting good performance indicators and monitoring them regularly. Whether it is for an e-commerce, lead generation or promotional microsite, it is always possible to set performance indicators adapted to the objectives.

With more than thirty Google Analytics implementations in the past few months, here are some of the comparisons we use for our site and for some of our clients. Some are often overlooked and have been put forward in the new version of Google Analytics.

Compare to site average

This performance indicator is very useful when you want to know the quality of a campaign or a site that refers to us. We can analyze the quality of visitors from various sources both in terms of site traffic and a specific objective.

Thus, by analyzing the traffic of the Adviso site, it is possible to notice that the visitors who stay on our site the longest on average are readers of our newsletter "Le Point de Repère" or users of the Netvibes RSS feed management. However, when it comes to downloading publications, visitors from the Branchez-Vous portal and coming directly to our site are very inclined to take action.

Compare sponsored links and natural results

Do you ever wonder if you are getting what you pay for with your keyword shopping. Although you are probably investing a large part of your budget in the pockets of the provider of this wonderful tool, this comparison may give an unflattering image to the results of Google Adwords.

Thus, for the Adviso site, the conversion rate of visitors coming from natural results having downloaded a document is around 1.5%, whereas it is 0.2% for commercial links. Since our keyword buying campaign is very small in scale and mostly for testing, we will not stop keyword buying. On the other hand, for some of our clients obtaining similar ratios, we have completely modified the strategy and the allocation of their budgets.

Compare your announcements and bulletin

Products like ad servers and emailing tools usually provide interesting click-through rate data when you A/B test banners or newsletter content. On the other hand, it becomes more interesting to know what people do on the site following the click.

During a test carried out a few months ago for the sending of our newsletter, we noticed that the number of pages visited on the site following a click in our newsletter "Le Point de Repère" went from 2.87 pages on average for a bulletin sent at 1:00 p.m. to 5.39 pages on average for the same bulletin sent 2 hours earlier at 11:00 a.m. This information is extremely useful when testing.

Although this article only lists a tiny fraction of the data you can get from Google Analytics, I hope it will inspire those who do not yet have a measurement tool and tracking mechanism to fill this gap!