analytics 101: your analytics uncovered
Although being consistent with your marketing efforts is great, it’s important to ensure that those efforts are actually working or else you’re spending time and money on something that isn’t going to bring a return. So how do you know what’s working and what isn’t? Analytics.
Analytics can seem like a big and scary monster to unleash, but taking the time to understand what all of the terms and numbers mean isn’t as bad as you think! This resource covers how to interpret the data for three main marketing sources: your website, your social media, and your email list.
your website
The easiest way to track how users are engaging with your website is by setting up Google Analytics, which you can do by following these instructions. If you have a web developer and don’t want to set this up yourself, we’d recommend reaching out to them for support.
Once everything is good to go with Google Analytics, now you can start paying attention to the data. You can even change the timeframe of the data that you’re looking at so you can be viewing results from the past week, month, 3 months, and even a custom time period. Although there are many components of Google Analytics that you can look through, we recommend focusing on the following.
USERS
This is the number of people who have initiated a session on your website during that time period. These users could be “old” users, meaning they’ve been on your site before, or they could be “new” users who have never been on your site before.
PAGE VIEWS
Page views are the number of times any page of your website has been viewed throughout the specified time period. This is a really good indication of your overall site traffic and how much visibility it’s getting.
SESSION DURATION
This is the average amount of time a user spends on your site before exiting. In this case, you’ll want as high of a number as possible because it will mean that your site visitors will be staying on your website for a longer amount of time! If this number is low, you can increase your session duration by internally linking to other pages and publishing more blog posts.
SITE CONTENT
Are you curious to see which pages on your website people view the most? This section shows you the number of page views each page has for the specified time period, which will help you to understand what type of content you might want to plan for the future.
Take a look at these numbers from the start of this year to the end of this year to see how your website has performed overall.
your social media
Have you been spending a good amount of time on building up your social media profiles over the past year and wondering how those efforts have played out? Fortunately, both Facebook and Instagram have built-in analytics tools that you can reference, however, please note that they don’t show you just any time period that you want. If you want to look farther back than what they’re showing, you’ll need to invest in a tool like Databox.
Take a look at the numbers to pay attention to on each platform.
Please note that analytics are only available once you reach 30 page likes. You can access your analytics by clicking the “Insights” tab on your page. You truthfully only need to pay attention to these three options:
page likes
This shows the number of new people who liked your page within the past week.
post engagement
This shows how every single one of your posts performs. You want to check this on a monthly basis to understand which type of content drives the most engagement so that you know what to plan for the month ahead. You can click on the post to see the exact data / numbers.
This section also shows you the best posting days / times, which is the line graph at the top. All you need to do is hover over each “boxed day” and watch the chart change to understand the most optimized times. Please note that these times are in the PST time zone, so you will need to adjust the time on your scheduling accordingly.
pages to watch
This allows you to track the performance of your competitors’ posts so that you can see what’s working for them and what isn’t, which may give you content ideas for the future. All you need to do is add their pages, and it will show up in this section.
Please note that you can only view analytics if your account is a business account and if you have at least 100 followers. You can access your analytics by clicking the three horizontal bars in the top right corner of your profile and then selecting “Insights.” You truthfully only need to pay attention to these three options:
growth
This is found under the “Your Audience” section and shows your net followers over the course of a week OR 30 days.
most active times
This is found under the “Your Audience” section and allows you to toggle between days of the week to understand the best posting times according to your specific audience.
individual post analytics
This shows how each post performed. Go to the post, click “View Insights,” swipe up, and take a peek at the data. If you see that a certain type of post consistently performs well, i.e. before and after photos, that indicates that you should post more of those because your audience likes to see them.
When viewing your individual post analytics, please keep in mind that the number of likes aren’t always the best indication of how well your post performed. You could receive 30 likes on a photo but then see that the photo had 7 sends or 13 saves or 3 website clicks. Those interactions are actually better than likes because it shows that your followers took it one step further with your content, which is ultimately what you want them to do.
Once you know how your accounts have performed and which content is performing well, you can use that information to plan your future content.
your email marketing
No matter what email marketing provider you use, they all have helpful data that you’ll want to follow for each newsletter that you send or automation / nurture sequence that you set up, as outlined below.
SUBSCRIBES
This is the total number of people who have signed up for your email list within the specified timeframe.
UNSUBSCRIBES
This is the total number of people who have removed themselves from your email list within the specified timeframe. People are bound to unsubscribe, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You just want to make sure that you’re paying close attention to it so that the number doesn’t get too high, which could cause some concern.
OPEN RATE
Open rate is the percent of subscribers who opened your email. This is important to pay attention to because although the percentage varies by industry, there are factors that affect this number. They include:
Day of the week / time that you send the email
Topic
Whether people saved you to their contacts or not (preventing spam)
Subject line
CLICK-THROUGH RATE
Click-through rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked a link in your email. This is important to pay attention to because although the percentage varies by industry, there are factors that affect this number. They include:
Number of links in your email (the more there are, the higher the chance people will click on them)
Buttons vs no buttons (buttons stand out more, which are more enticing for clicking)
If you get a higher open rate and click-through rate on certain emails, that’s an indication to you to publish more content that falls within that same theme, as your audience resonated with it.
If you pay attention to the analytics to these three marketing outlets, you can easily find ways to effectively and efficiently continue to boost your online presence! You can also use our Worksheet here to help keep track of and dive into your analytics.