Use Google Analytics, Delight Your Users
With traffic tracking tools like Google Analytics, measuring the effectiveness of your website comes down to numbers and figures.
Here you get the hard facts about your website; what works for users, and what doesn’t. As SixRevisions contributor Claudiu Murariu suggests, “the quality of a web design can only really be measured quantitatively in the results it brings to the site.”
Web analytics are an essential component to any successful web marketing strategy. At Navigator Multimedia, we employ Google Analytics in an ongoing effort to assure that users are interacting with our products to delightful effect.
Delighting users goes beyond satisfying their needs. To do so, you must have a rich impression of how your user explores a website, and what could make the experience memorable.
What does Google Analytics provide?
And here’s where that data comes in. Google Analytics gives you the statistics for page visits, time spent on pages, and percentage of return visits, among other data. Perhaps you have a call-to-action button on the homepage that links to your online catalogue. It may be receiving hundreds of clicks, but are users staying in the catalogue section once they get there? Google Analytics can tell you.
Why use Google Analytics?
When you delight a user, you exceed their expectations and create a positive impression of your business brand. When call-to-action button clicks are high, but time spent on the linked page is low, a user expectation was likely met but not exceeded. You provided the user with what they wanted (access to an online catalogue), but failed to compel them to explore further. With data from GA you can begin to identify these types of problems and fix them.
How do I improve my site with information from Google Analytics?
Analytics provide designers and site owners with goals. Instead of striking blindly at a site design to rustle up some semblance of a “delightful user experience”, designers can focus on improving pages with high bounce rates*, and monitor the traffic changes after layout and content revisions have been delivered.
While we cannot possibly design to please every user, we can create optimal solutions for a targeted group. We can delight users and build memorable brand associations for long-term effects. Google Analytics provides the data to make it happen.
Call us at Navigator Multimedia to get Google Analytics installed on your website today!
*Bounce rate describes the percentage of web users who enter a website and leave without any interaction, most commonly moving to another page
References
Murariu, Claudio. “How to Measure the Effectiveness of Web Designs.” 7 February 2011.SixRevisions.com: http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/how-to-measure-the-effectiveness-of-web-designs/
