Attracting Traffic and Improving Site Engagement with Google Analytics

Name: Attracting Traffic and Improving Site Engagement with Google Analytics
Author: Christopher Pittman

How to use Google to help optimize website content and calls to action

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Course: On-Demand

In this video, we're going to be talking about Traffic Sources within Google Analytics 4. What they are, how to increase traffic to them, and kind of the value of understanding your traffic sources in Google Analytics 4. For this report, I am currently looking at my snapshot report. This should be the base configuration for... mostly... every account, unless you've made modifications to the account, which you can go up here in Customize Report, and make modifications to these reports. But, this one should be our standard configuration for all Google Analytics 4 accounts. So, let's look at some of the things that it gives us: Direct traffic, Organic Search, Paid Shopping, Social Organic, and then Referral traffic. This is just what we have on this particular website. Of course, we can change the dates and do some different things here. Let's do... Let's look at the whole year. Okay. So, as we look at the whole year here in this account, we see that a lot of our traffic here is Organic Search. Organic Search is going to be the things that come up in Google. It's your keywords, it's your content, more than anything. Direct search are people that know your product and know your domain, if you give somebody your business card, they're going to have that URL in it. They type that in, or just type in the name of your company, then that'll be direct search. Paid Shopping is a interesting bucket, because in Google Merchant Center, you can set up a Google Merchant Center account and get what's called Paid Shopping traffic, that's tracked in Google Analytics 4. We don't even do Paid Shopping, but we set up that in Google Analytics 4 to actually show for free. So, it's free shopping traffic is what it's tracking here. Let me show you what that looks like and then we'll hop back over and talk about these other sources here. Okay, so we're here in Google Merchant Center. And what you can see is we've got Enhanced Free listings, we've got Shopping listings, and we've got our Buy on Google listings. Now, we're running our free, Enhanced listing and we're running our Buy on Google listing. So, what's being tracked over in Google Analytics, is our free ad performance in - it's our free listings, and those are being tracked. As you can see, we don't have any paid Shopping ads. So that's what's being tracked in Google analytics in these reports as Paid Shopping. It's one of those things you have to actually dig down into the campaign level when you see Paid Shopping, when you're running something like this. Anybody that does products, physical products - drop shipping or maybe you make products or produce products. The Buy on Google, as of this year, no longer charges a fee. So that's now a free source of marketing for physical products, and then your Enhanced free listing - of course, anything you can put in Google shops that's an actual physical product. You can put both in Enhanced free and in Google shops. So, that's something that... is actually very valuable when it comes to getting traffic to the website. As you can see, 37, that's about half of our Organic Search volume, has then just been this paid search with just free shopping ads, effectively. And then Organic Social, if you run Instagram, Twitter, we just launched those a few days ago. So if you're running Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, any of those secondary social media sites, will be tracked as Social Organic, unless you're doing paid ads like Facebook, then there's some additional things we need to set up within that. Referrals are other websites that we send our link to. So, let's say we've got a gardening book and that gardening book - in the back of it has an ebook - has a link to our website. And then, because it's a URL being an ebook, now it counts as a referral for this particular website. So, that's our major categories here, and where the traffic's from of course, and user acquisition over time is always something to look at because you want to see that growing. So, let's look at our sources here, and talk a little bit about what's going on within our analytic sources, and what we can do to kind of optimize these traffic sources within Google Analytics - within the website, actually. But, we use Google Analytics as a reference, and as indicators for what's going on in the website. So referrals, we get five seconds on Referrals. Okay, this and this zero seconds on social media - these two would indicate that we may have a problem with website load speed. In a previous video, we talked about how to troubleshoot into that and how to dive into that and look at that, turns out that it's got a mobile website, speed website performance problem that we need to address. So that's these here, and then everything else is relatively decent. The Direct traffic, I would expect that to actually be more than just a few seconds. I would expect it to be outperforming Organic traffic in most cases. But, these are our primary traffic sources for this particular brand, for this website. And as you can see, they're not doing optimal, but there is room for improvement here, and it all comes back to that mobile issue that we were having in the previous videos.

Advanced Provider : Christopher Pittman 3 Lessons · 18m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

If it is optimizing copy or checking for user pain points Google Analytics has an option for that. The first and most important thing covered in this section of videos is the uses of channels and how the channel traffic can indicate issues with the website. A/B testing can go a long way toward total website optimization from the user experience side. These lessons cover custom channels and testing that not only will allow for the optimization and comparison of calls to action but these systems can also be used to spot suspected bot traffic and overall issues with the website

Learning Objectives:

What You'll Learn

Define each standard channel and explain the differences between channels
Use channels to identify website issues and direct marketing efforts
Recognize what bot traffic looks like in your analytics
Apply A/B testing and custom channels to optimize and compare calls to action
Utilize and optimize the Acquisition report to improve site engagement
Identify additional tools beyond Google Analytics for diagnosing suspected website issues

Key Takeaways

Channel traffic data can indicate issues with a website, making channels a useful diagnostic signal.
Custom channels and A/B testing support optimizing and comparing calls to action.
These same systems can help spot suspected bot traffic and overall website issues.
Tools other than Google Analytics can be used when a website issue is suspected.
Channels can be used to direct marketing efforts and to optimize the Acquisition report.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

It covers the uses of channels and how channel traffic can indicate website issues, custom channels, A/B testing for optimizing and comparing calls to action, spotting suspected bot traffic, and using and optimizing the Acquisition report.

What skills will I gain from this course?

The course develops skills in Analytics, Category Analytics, Google Analytics, Traffic Analysis, Web Analytics, and Web Traffic.

What topics are included in the lessons?

The lessons cover Traffic Sources, Increasing User Engagement, and Improving User Engagement.

Will I learn how to detect bot traffic?

Yes. The course explains what bot traffic looks like, and the channel and testing systems covered can be used to spot suspected bot traffic.

Does the course only rely on Google Analytics?

No. While the focus is Google Analytics, the course also covers tools other than Google Analytics that can be used when a website issue is suspected.