Using Google to Measure your Websites Performance

 

When you're running a website it's always useful to be able to keep track of how it's doing, as well as being incredibly interesting! Being able to see your website growing more and more successful with rising page views and decreasing bounce rates can be rather satisfying. Google has a couple of handy and free tools you can use to help your site perform better and keep track of how well it’s doing. The main and most popular method of tracking your website is Googles first handy tool:

Over 27 million website owners measure their sites traffic using google analytics and it’s fairly easy to get to grips with! Including a number of features providing eye opening statistics. Some ways you can use the tools to your advantage are:

Tracking the success of your marketing campaigns.
When you carry out a successful campaign you will be able to see how your number of page visits increases showing how much new traffic it is bringing to your site and therefore how successful it is. If your marketing campaign aims to attract people to your website tracking your increasing page views is an easy way of checking it's working.

To determine where your visitors are from and what they look at.
Finding out the locations where your website is receiving its most views from can be very interesting, especially when you see views pop up from all over the world! It can help you to work out areas your product is most popular or where you are currently reaching, giving you ideas of where and how to expand your reach. You can also look for trends, such as whether people from certain locations view certain pages more than others. It can help you decide where your target audience is located and whether you are reaching them successfully.

To learn how people are finding your website.
One of the most helpful features Analytics has to offer when it comes to SEO is allowing you to see where people are coming from. This is how your customers are finding your site. You will notice that only a small percentage will find your website directly by typing your url into the address bar, the majority will come from search engines, the most popular being Google and Bing. Analytics will provide you with information such as what search terms people are using before coming to your blog. When figuring out how to boost your SEO this allows you to see what keywords may be the most useful to you and what keywords are already working. If you carry out SEO work you can also see how effective your keywords are by using this feature.

Tracking which pages are most successful and which aren't.
You can identify your best and worst pages by looking at their individual bounce rate and how long people spend on a page. The longer a customer stays on the page the more interested they are or helpful the page is to them, if they view a page quickly before moving on then the page is being useless to them. This can tell you if any pages particularly need extra work or changing.

To see if people are accessing your site via mobile devices or desktops.
This can be extremely helpful in deciding whether or not it is time to upgrade your site to a responsive design. Analytics will provide you with percentages of how many people are accessing your site via various devices. If you notice an increase in views from mobile devices it is a pretty good indication you need to ensure your site works effectively on mobiles.

This leads us onto Googles next helpful tool:

Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool
Towards the end of April this year google announced a mobile friendly algorithm update designed to give a boost to sites it deems mobile friendly in search results. This focuses on usability and due to so many people using their smart phones to search it only makes sense that websites which are designed with mobile capability should make top of the list. But this means that many websites are being pushed down the list of search results and are missing out simply because they need an update.

Googles mobile friendly test tool allows you to check how mobile friendly your site is. Simply enter your URL and it will say whether the page passes or fails. It also provides a preview of your site so you can see for yourself what it looks like on a mobile.

If you test your website and it fails the test, we would highly recommend a website redesign as it could greatly increase your traffic and business by upgrading to a mobile friendly responsive design.