Analyze Your Year & Plan for Q1 Using Google Analytics
As Q4 is coming to an end and Q1 is looming in the distance, it’s critical to take this time to look back so you can move forward.
Knowing your website’s performance is extremely important to set goals for the new year. The best way to dig into your website performance is to explore your metrics and data from the last year.
That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics gives you visibility into your business and helps you understand what has happened in your business over the past year. Ask yourself what sources drove traffic, what was the most and the least viewed content, and which visitors took necessary actions on your site.
The answers to these questions will help support and guide your year-over-year business decisions. Three areas are essential to look at:
Audience
Engagement
Conversions
You can paint a complete picture of your business over the last 12 months by pulling metrics from these three essential areas.
Before you start analyzing your data and pulling metrics, you need to write down everything you did for your business throughout your year from a marketing perspective. Think about promotions, collaborations, email campaigns, product launches, and anything else that drives traffic to your website.
Make a list of what you did and when it happened. This list gives you a clear set of data to compare to your website metrics and assign value to the actions you took throughout the year.
This is the best way to see your actions’ impact on your website and business.
Now, let’s look at the three areas—audience, engagement, and conversions—and break down how you can use these metrics to set goals for Q1 and beyond.
Audience
When we talk about “audience,” we are talking about the traffic coming to your website. And we look at audience through three different metric categories:
The quantity of visits: how many people came to your website?
The quality of visits: how qualified were these people?
The sources that drive visits: where did people come from?
Quantity of visits (sessions)
When looking at the quantity of visits, you are investigating the number of people who visited your website during a defined period.
The key to year-over-year traffic and audience analysis is looking for the trends in your data. Are there periods in the year that bring in more traffic? Can you tie these trends back to your sales and marketing campaigns? Does your business have seasonal trends that you can expect each year?
For example, an accountant could expect to see a lot of traffic at the beginning of the year, and then around May/June, their traffic would peter off—this would be expected based on the tax season each year. When you understand the seasonality of your business, you’ll be able to see—and optimize for—the patterns that emerge over time.
Metrics to evaluate the quantity of visits in GA4:
Sessions — the number of visits to your website.
Users — the number of people who visited your website.
New Users — the number of people who visited your website for the first time.
Quality of visits (sessions)
When we talk about the quality of visits coming to your website, we’re talking about how engaged a person was with your site when they visited. Did they stay on the site or leave right away? Did they browse around and view multiple pages, or did they remain on the page they initially entered? Did they spend enough time on your site to complete a meaningful action?
By adding the metric of “quality” to “quantity,” you can examine how much of your traffic will eventually convert.
Metrics to evaluate the quantity of visits in GA4:
Bounce rate — the percentage of people who immediately exited your site after load.
Bounce rate x sessions = non-bounced sessions — this gives you the number of sessions that did not bounce, and we’re engaged.
Engaged sessions — a session that spends more than 10 seconds on your site, views two or more pages or completes a conversion (a goal you define) on your website.
Returning users — users that have visited your site before; essentially, a return customer.
Traffic sources
Understanding the sources that drive traffic to your website can help you see what has been working and hasn’t in your business. The first question to ask yourself is which traffic sources brought you the volume of visits you wanted. Then dig into the quality of those visits—because if a traffic source brings in a lot of traffic, but it is unqualified traffic, then that source is not performing the way you’d like.
Examining your traffic sources allows you to explore where you should be putting your effort moving forward. Maybe you’ve been spending time and money on an in-depth Instagram strategy, but it isn’t resulting in traffic. Or perhaps you’ve all but ignored organic traffic, but it’s bringing in your most qualified traffic.
This data gives you a better understanding of what traffic sources are helping your business, where you might want to change a specific strategy, and where you should focus your efforts in Q1.
Metrics to evaluate traffic sources in GA4:
All of the metrics above!
Filter by traffic source and look at engaged sessions, sessions, bounce rate, etc., to understand which traffic sources are performing best and which may need to shift focus.
You can’t make decisions by just looking at your audience numbers—you need to combine that with your engagement metrics.
Engagement
Audience numbers will show you how many people came in the door. But your engagement metrics show how many people engaged with your content. Engagement metrics will show you what people are doing when they come to your website.
When you examine what content your visitors engage with, you can ask yourself questions that can help optimize your strategy. What pages did they look at? Are the pages essential to your business—for example, your services page—get seen enough? Are they spending enough time on your site to complete a vital action like signing up for something or making a purchase? This is where we start to see the importance of analyzing your engagement data.
Once again, break this data down by traffic sources so you can see what sources produce engaged traffic. Consider using your data to answer the following questions for your business:
What content did your social media traffic look at?
What content did your organic traffic look at?
What content did your paid traffic look at?
Did they view one page or multiple pages?
What was the subject matter of the pages they viewed? Do you see a trend here?
You can also define what an engagement rate is for your site. If you decide that a person needs to spend at least three minutes on your site to be fully engaged or look at two or more pages, you can filter your data to see what percentage of traffic matches your definition of engagement.
When engagement and audience metrics work together
Now that you have your engagement and audience data, it’s time to combine them!
Take your traffic sources and the metrics you have for how many sessions came for that source and how qualified they were. Then connect that with how engaged the traffic from said traffic source was with your content. Use your defined engagement rate to qualify this traffic and build a bigger picture.
For example, you can see that email is driving a lot of traffic to your website—but that traffic is not engaging once they arrive. You’ve defined that they need to see three pages to be “engaged,” but they are looking at two or fewer per visit. You know that email is a great traffic driver for your business. Now you need to explore why those visitors aren’t engaging—maybe your user experience is not functioning correctly, you aren’t sending them to the right place, or the copy doesn’t match the visuals.
Whatever it may be, there is a disconnect between the traffic source and the engagement rate. The good news is that you can start testing to find a solution now that you’ve identified the disconnect. Traffic is great, but if your visitors aren’t engaging with your site, they will not convert. Significant traffic doesn’t necessarily equal significant revenue.
Metrics to evaluate engagement in GA4
When you decide to use a specific metric, it is essential to stick with your metric. You can add more metrics anytime you want. To see the impact over time, you need to track the same metrics month over month.
Pages per visit: the average number of pages seen per visit.
Average session duration: the average time people spend on your site.
Engagement rate: the percentage of visitors to your site categorized as engaged versus your total visitors.
You can also explore your landing pages, sections of the website, and traffic sources. Look at all of the above metrics, filtered by landing page, sections, or traffic sources, to get a deeper understanding of what pages perform best in terms of engagement.
Conversions
Conversions are about understanding what key actions on your website led to revenue and how many people completed one of those actions. For some businesses, this could be as straightforward as making a purchase.
But conversions are also defined as sales opportunities or actions that show a person is interested in hearing more about your business. Conversions include signing up for a sales demonstration, booking a discovery call, downloading a lead magnet, or even signing up for a newsletter—any sales opportunity that gives you access to that person.
You need to understand when a conversion happens, and you need a way to track these actions and events in Google. Conversions—formerly called goals in UA—need to be set up in Google Analytics. You need to tell Google what events are important to your business so that you can track them and you can use that data in the future.
How to track your conversions
If you haven’t set up your goals in Google Analytics, this workaround will allow you to track the most basic conversions on your site. This won’t give you the same depth of information as a conversion in GA4 will, but it is a great place to start.
You need to ensure that all of your sign-up pages load a unique “thank you for signing up” page once someone has filled in their information and hit “submit.” If you have these pages set up, you can track the views to these pages, which will give you an accurate insight into how many conversions have taken place.
You can execute this solution on your own, and it gives you a clear view of the volume of conversion actions taking place. When you are ready to gain a deeper understanding of people’s conversion actions on your site, you will need to set up specific conversion events in your Google Analytics. Doing so can create a tailored experience within Google Analytics that illustrates what is vital to your business.
If you’re ready to leverage the power of conversions, our Complete Analytics Implementation Package includes creating conversions, so you have complete visibility into your overall business performance.
Metrics to evaluate conversions in GA4
Whether you are using the simple “thank you” page method or you’ve set up conversions within GA4, it is important to look at either the number of conversions or the number of views to your thank you page. This gives you the total number of conversions for each conversion action on your website.
You can look at how this number changes month to month. This metric also lets you explore which conversions performed as expected and which didn’t. It gives you the information you need to ask questions about how you can move forward to optimize your conversion events.
It allows you to identify which actions happen most often and examine whether these results align with your expectations. If the results you’re seeing don’t match your expected outcome, this is your opportunity to experiment.
Conversion rates
To take it to the next level, you can look at your conversion rate—the percentage of people who looked at your website versus those who converted. Your conversion rate speaks to the quality of your traffic. If you have a lot of traffic—or a sudden increase—but a low conversion rate, it’s safe to assume that the traffic coming to your site isn’t qualified.
There are two different ways to calculate your conversion rate. Both give you visibility into the performance of your conversion events in different ways. We recommend you look at both, but if you choose to use one or the other, be consistent and stick with it.
The most general, straightforward method to calculate conversion rate is to take your total number of conversions and divide it by your total number of visits:
Total # of conversions / total visits = conversion rate
With this calculation, you will understand how many people are taking action on your website. This conversion rate doesn’t give you the granularity to make changes in certain places because it looks at all your conversion events simultaneously.
If you want more detail and to be able to tweak your efforts when needed, the second conversion rate calculation will give you that ability. This calculation isolates the first step of the conversion so you can see how specific pages/conversion events are performing.
Total signs up / views of sign-up landing page = conversion rate
This calculation gives you visibility into how each page performs and shows how effective a specific starting point is at converting people.
As always, you want to look at trends over time, giving you a fuller picture of your year-over-year business performance.
Another metric to consider is the traffic source. You will need to ensure you set up your GA4 conversions to track the traffic source—if you add in the secondary metric of traffic source and all of the responses come back as direct traffic, this is a clear sign that your traffic sources are not being tracked accurately.
When set up correctly, the traffic source shows you where people taking a meaningful step on your website—aka or completing a conversion event—are coming from. This information lets you optimize for those traffic sources and make the most of the sales and marketing efforts.
Remember to keep your expectations for each traffic source in mind. Not every traffic source is designed to be a high converter—you may have some sources used solely for brand awareness, and you are not expecting high conversion rates there. What you should be looking for is that the traffic is quality traffic.
Looking forward to Q1 and beyond
Now that you know your audience’s quantity and quality, engagement levels, and conversions, what’s next? How can this data support you moving forward?.
It’s about setting targets for your next quarter or the following year. Your targets will be your best friends—they will quickly show you if your efforts are paying off in the way you expect. Think of your targets as a quick visual to help you understand what is and isn’t working.
If you aren’t sure how to set targets, that’s where your historical data comes in. Look at your performance and decide on a realistic, attainable target based on those numbers. Maybe you want to increase your conversions by 10% for the year, or maybe you’re focused on improving your bounce rate and want to lower it by 1% each month. Whatever targets you set, it’s all about having the right data that allows you to make meaningful changes that move the needle.
You should set targets for all the key metrics you decide are essential for your business. At the very least, you should have at least one target for audience, engagement, and conversions because these categories talk to, inform, and impact each other.
It can be super daunting to look at a year’s worth of data and analyze it. By looking at these larger, overarching trends, you have a better opportunity to truly understand what your business goes through and how you can best optimize for your success in the new year.
Remember, if you don’t make a change, you won’t see a change.
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