Leave them up if you only ever report your numbers for Pageviews and/or Visits to your management?
If you still have your hand up, Stop it. Now!
Google Analytics will serve you much better if you use it to answer questions you have about how your site is used. The answers you can get from analytics will allow you to make better decisions about improving your site.
Today I was wondering about how often people who regularly use our website visit. I was interested because we have some promotional space on our home page, which we use to highlight particular collections, events or services. We change them regularly (about once a month) but it occurred to me that perhaps that was not the best period. Maybe they should be rotated more or less often, to ensure that our regular visitors saw them (at least potentially) on our home page.
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| the section of our homepage dedicated to promoting services |
Enter Google Analytics...
I started by creating an advanced segment to show only those visitors to the site who matched both the following criteria
- Returning visitors (this was not their first visit)
- Visited the home page (they had viewed the page with the promo section)
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| Creating the advanced segment in Google Analytics |
After applying that filter I could see more about the behaviour of those people. There is a report in Google Analytics called Frequency vs Recency (under audience > behavior), which shows how often people visit your site.
By loading the Frequency vs Recency report with my custom segment and switching the focus to 'days since last visit' I can see distribution of how often repeat visitors visit our site.
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| The frequency vs Recency report showing the bulge in visits between 2-6 weeks |
You can see from the graph that the largest number of visitors viewed the site more than once a day. This seems to suggest our internal visits as staff visit the site many times a day for various reasons.
Apart from that, we have a cluster of return visitors that visit in the 8-14 days, 15-30 days and 31-60 days that stand out in the distribution, with a slight leaning toward the lower end of that spectrum. Let's say there's a bulge in the repeat visitors at 2-4 weeks. That makes sense as our loan period is 3 weeks. It seems probable that many people are visiting the site around the end of their loan period to renew their loans or look for more books, etc.
This is good news for me as it confirms my hunch that we should rotate our promotional messages about once a month to ensure that the most number of people see them, but that they don't see them over and over again. It's always good to know that your best guess is backed up by the data.
Based on the insight gained here, the next step might be to consider which of the many links we place in the promo section is generating the most engagement? What are the things that entice people to click through for more information? That will have to wait for another blog post.
So for what it's worth, I recommend that you approach Google Analytics with questions rather than simply using it to gather high level metrics that don't help you improve your site.
If you've used Google Analytics to answer questions or gain insight I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
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