Using Google Analytics to Ferret Out Website Issues

Google Analytics is one of the most insightful ways to see how people are using your site, but it is perhaps one of the most underused. This powerful tool not only allows you to gain important information about how your customers are viewing your website, how long they are staying on pages, how they are getting there, but it is incredibly useful for identifying problems that your users are encountering while they are using your site. Not identifying and correcting these problems leads to lost revenues. Some very important problems that Google Analytics can help you identify are site speed, sudden traffic drops and look for 404-page sessions. Let us take a quick look at them in detail: Site Speed: According to https://www.websitemagazine.com, 47% of website visitors expect a site to load in less than two seconds and 40% of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than three seconds. I can attest to that, because I am just as guilty as everyone else is. I expect sites to load fast and if they don’t I move on to one that will. That doesn’t sound fair, but it is the reality of the world we are doing business in. Google Analytics captures the average load time for each page samples. The metric is comprised of two factors:

1. The time it takes the server to respond to the page request, and
2. The time it takes the browser to parse, download and display the page.

Additionally, it breaks down the individual steps in the page loading process, capturing things like average redirection time, average page download time, average document interactive time and many other valuable tools regarding timing during the process. Sudden Traffic Drops: Monitoring your daily traffic allows you to establish a pattern and if you see a sudden drop, it could identify that your site went down or is not functioning properly. Google Analytics also features a custom alert option to notify you immediately if traffic drops.

Identify 404 Page Sessions: We have all been there and it is beyond frustrating. You either type in a website address or try to link out and get the dreaded 404 page. When visitors get this message, it can leave them frustrated and moving on to a competitor’s site. Google Analytics allows you to see how many times people encountered an error page on your site. You can locate pages containing broken or outdated links allowing you to correct them before your customers find them.

These areas of problem identification are just a snippet of everything Google Analytics has to offer business owners. All of this information is right at your fingertips and waiting for you to access it, but that takes time and for any business, time is money. It is easy to get wrapped up in running your day-to-day business operations and put things such as this on the backburner and then you put it off another day and another and suddenly you are overwhelmed with trying to get caught up. That’s ok, Cyberspyder is here to help and here to take care of the analytics for you. We can monitor your site traffic and identify problems early on keeping you from losing valuable revenue. Contact CyberSpyder today at (479) 782-0005 or [email protected] to set up a plan that is right for you.