Learn how to use Google Analytics to improve sales of your Tours
How do you make decisions that will affect your website, based on a hunch or based on conversations with your customers?
If you are not analysing your website statistics you are missing a lot of opportunities to grow your business.
Are you using Google Analytics?
We're going to go over the basics and some specific tools, but before we get there, here's a quick summary:
Google Analytics is a freemium (free and premium) website analytics tool that tells you how well your website is performing. With Google Analytics you can track:
- The number of users visiting your website.
- How they find you.
- What device they are using.
- Where customers abandon when they browse your website.
In short, Google Analytics provides incredibly valuable information about what works and what doesn't when it comes to your website. When you recognise your strengths and weaknesses, you can optimise your website to convert your users more effectively, i.e. get more customers to buy your products.
Getting started with Google Analytics
Before delving into some of the reports provided by Google Analytics, first answer a critical question: Do you have a Google Analytics account?
If the answer is no, then the first step is to set up an account and install your unique tracking code on your website and in your TuriTop control panel.
The process of adding the tracking code to your site varies depending on the type of content management system (CMS) you are using. The following list includes the most common CMSs and a link to instructions on how to add the Google Analytics tag for each:
Essential Google Analytics reports to evaluate your website's performance
After adding your Google Analytics tag to your website, it can take between 24-72 hours to start collecting data from your users. Even after you start seeing data in your account, you will probably need to wait until you have at least 1-3 months of data before drawing conclusions.
Once you have collected a few months' worth of data, you can start digging into your reports to identify trends. These five reports give you a basic overview of what your website is doing well and what needs to be optimised.
1- Audience overview
This report gives you a broad overview of the overall performance of your website. Here you can see things like:
- how many people visit your website per day.
- the number of new versus returning users
- and the average bounce rate of your website over a given period of time
Let us look at two key points here:
Web traffic
Before we talk numbers, there are two key terms you need to understand: users y sessions.
A user is a person only who visited your website. A user is considered "new" when they visit your website for the first time. Returning users have visited your website before.
When a user visits your website they activate a session, which is the duration of time spent clicking and browsing the site. By default, sessions will time out after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user clicks on your website after being idle for 30 minutes, a new session is started. Then, a user may have multiple sessions on your website.
Bounce rate
A "bounce" is when a user visits your website and does not take any further action before leaving your website. For example, a user arrives at your homepage and leaves without clicking on any other page or button.
Bounce rate of 0-15%: Generally a sign of incorrect data.
Very low bounce rates often mean that your Google Analytics tag is incorrectly implemented on your website and is not collecting accurate user data. Make sure that the tag has been added correctly to your website.
Bounce rate of 16-40%: Excellent bounce rate.
The users who visit your website are high quality potential customers and are interested in your tours and activities.
Bounce rate of 41-60%: Average bounce rate.
Your website performs well, but bounce rates close to 60% indicate that there is room for improvement.
Bounce rate of 61-90%: Poor bounce rate.
Your website could use some serious optimisation. Is your site mobile-friendly? Is it easy for the user to navigate? How many clicks does it take to make a booking? Does it have too much or too little website content?
Now that we have a basic understanding of the bounce rate of a website, let's dig a little deeper by looking at bounce rates across all devices.now that we have a basic understanding of the bounce rate of a website, let's dig a little deeper by looking at bounce rates across all devices.now that we have a basic understanding of the bounce rate of a website, let's dig a little deeper by looking at bounce rates across all devices.
2- Mobile Overview (Mobile Overview)
The Mobile Device Overview report breaks down how your website performs on different devices, specifically computers, mobiles and tablets.
Why is this valuable? Because your website may work well on computers but not on mobiles (or vice versa). In an increasingly mobile-dependent world, it is essential to have a mobile-optimised website.
3.- Acquisition Overview
Do you know where most of the traffic to your website comes from? Are most of your users looking for it through search or are they looking for it through social media?
The Acquisition Overview report answers all of these questions. Looking at this report, you can see that there are four main channels that drive traffic: organic search, direct, referral and social. If you perform search or display advertising, you will see those shown as channels here as well.
What are each of these channels?
- Organic searchwhen users find your website by typing keywords into Google (or a different search engine).
- Direct: the users enters your domain directly in the browser's url field.
- Note that if Google Analytics cannot recognise the source of the traffic from a visit, it will categorise it as direct traffic. Therefore, up to 60% of direct traffic is usually organic search or referral. This is known as "Dark Traffic" as its true source is veiled.
- Referencewhen users find your website by clicking on a link on a different website.
- Socialwhen users find your website from a social networking page, such as Facebook.
Your main traffic channels are also influenced by your domain and page authority, overall SEO and your social media engagement or digital marketing strategy. When your website has solid authority and good SEO, your main channel is likely to be organic search.
4.- Behaviour Flow
Want to know how your users flow through your website? The behavioural flow report shows where users arrive on your site and which pages they visit during their session. Home pages are the pages users arrive at and every interaction thereafter is the next page along their journey.
Ideally, we would like our customers to enter the Booking funnel in 1-3 clicks.ideally, we would like our customers to enter the Booking funnel in 1-3 clicks.ideally, we would like our customers to enter the Booking funnel in 1-3 clicks.
5.- Ecommerce Overview
The E-commerce Overview report is where you can see and track your website's performance from a conversion point of view. First, let's talk about what your conversion rate is. conversion in Ecommerce.
Your Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of your total website traffic that completes a purchase. So, if 100 people visit your website today and 5 people book something, your conversion rate for that day is 5%.