5 Things Your Care Business Should Track When Using Google Analytics
Posted on | Posted in General, Care Home Marketing, Home Care Marketing, Blog
If your care business has a website, tracking its performance is absolutely essential if you want to understand how well it is (or isn’t) driving traffic, leads, and sales. And one of the most powerful tools we recommend for doing just that is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics provides a robust amount of data with reports that offer insights into how your website is performing.
There are many different ways that your care business website can increase its rates of retention and conversion, but prior to taking on this task, you must first figure out which specific metrics you are trying to improve. This blog post is a good starting point in giving you an idea of which metrics are the most important to be tracking.
1. Bounce Rate
Let’s start with Bounce Rate. The bounce rate can be defined as the amount of times new visitors visit your site and then immediately leave it without completing any tasks, which is indicated with very little time spent on your site and no interactions.
To be able to increase the value per visit you need to aim to minimise the bounce rate. Having a high bounce rate can mean your landing pages have low usability, aren’t mobile friendly, have poor design, or a long load time. This is something you should be tracking.
2. New or Unique Visitor Conversions
It is vital to know that the way in which a returning visitor interacts with your website will be different from how a first-time visitor will interact with your website. In order to be able to improve the experience for first-time visitors, you must isolate the conversion rates from returning visitors. You must determine what it is that they see when they are first visiting your website, and how you can take action to improve this initial visit and their overall experience.
You will have a low rate of conversion for new or unique visitors if your website is not user friendly. It needs to provide a great user experience up front. This is definitely something you should be tracking.
3. Sources of Traffic
In an ideal world, your website would have incoming traffic streaming in from a variety of sources. There are three categories for the primary sources: direct visitors, search visitors, and referral visitors.
Your direct visitors will be those who have come to your site by typing in your exact URL into the address bar in their browser.
Your search visitors will be those who have arrived at your website based on a search query that they have entered.
Your referral visitors will be those who visit the website because it was mentioned somewhere on another website or blog that they were visiting.
All three of the sources are important, but they have different levels of conversion. Because of this, you should be calculating how much traffic each individual source is converting, and then take specific action based on these numbers.
4. Devices
The Devices metric in Google Analytics highlights how many users visit your website on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices and it is important because it can help you determine whether to focus your efforts on a particular experience.
For example, you may want to invest time and resources into optimising your website’s desktop experience, but it turns out that most of our site traffic is on mobile devices or vice versa. Understanding what devices your users visit your website on, will help you prioritise your efforts. Devices is also a metric you should be keeping an eye on.
5. Average Session Duration
This is the average length of time (in hours, minutes, and seconds) that a visitor spends in a session on your website. This has a direct correlation with how relevant your website is to the visitor—the more relevant it is, the more time that a visitor will spend accessing the information contained on your website that is of interest to them.
When the interactions per visit is low and the duration of the average session is high, it could be indicative of a web page having too much information or what they’re seeing may be confusing, forcing them to stay longer to figure it out.
Your calls to action should always be clear and straightforward. It’s always good to track the average time people are spending on your site.
Once you are aware of the metrics that are most important, you will be able to better utilise Google Analytics to track the progress of your website’s own metrics. This is important as it’ll help identify areas that could use improvement with messaging, usability, functionality, design, or a combination of the various factors.
While it’s important to track these metrics, it’s also important to keep in mind that they are not 100% precise and avoid getting bogged down with the exact numbers. Leverage insights to note trends, make adjustments, and watch for changes.