Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool you can use to measure several things, including:
- How people find your website
- How long they stay
- What they read
- How many return
It will tell you how well your site converts donors and subscribers, and how you can optimize your to rank higher in SERPs.
Following are five reports that you can use to get more from your website:
1. Keywords Reports
This report will help you write better content using words that your visitors use! Use these top keywords to enhance your webpages so that they’ll rank even higher in search engines. Make sure you’ve included them in your title tags, your met descriptions, your first two paragraphs, and even your image alt text.
2. Referring Sites
This report shows you where your visitors are coming from, so that you can develop strategies to get even more traffic from those sites. For example, if you notice that you’re getting a lot of returning visitors from a well-known blogger, you could develop that relationship into a partnership.
3. Top Content
This report shows you the pages people view the most.
You should make sure these pages include a clear call to action, such as donate or join an email list. You could also add text links to strategically drive more traffic to other critical pages on your site.
4. Top Exit Pages
This report shows you what pages people view before leaving your site. Look for any obvious reasons for people leaving on these pages, like bad design, external links, or slow page load times. You also want optimized to capture Facebook fans or email subscribers so you can at least keep in touch with them after they leave.
5. New Verses Returning
This report will show you what percent of your visitors return–essentially your fans.
If you’re losing fans, there could be a lot of reasons, but knowing the reasons is a first step to solving the problem. After viewing this, you could revisit your top exit pages to see if you can identify any trends. And as I mentioned before, the real money is in retaining fans and donors.