Run these basic Google Analytics reports on your community website at least monthly – or weekly when a marketing campaign is underway.
1. New Sessions, Returning Sessions & Users
Keep it simple: view the 12-Month Sessions report often. That’s it. If your sessions spike up or seem low, consult your digital marketing gurus to explain.
2. Bounce Rate
Always balance your 12-Month Sessions report with your Bounce Rate data. When you pair these reports, you’ve created an insightful combo. Why?
As a rule: the lower the bounce rate of your community website, the more targeted the prospects who are viewing it.
More sessions means more traffic and potentially more interest from future buyers, but you need to be careful. One thing you can do is scrub your traffic to see who is visiting.
These two reports gauge the quantity and quality of traffic to your community’s site. From there, you can diagnose problems or build on your success.
3. Pages/Session & Average Session Duration
Pages/Session and Average Session Duration tells you how much time folks spend on your community website and how many pages they access.
That combination is powerful because it indicates user engagement with your website. Track your content over time to see how these numbers change.
4. Overlay Historical Data
Keep the same Google Analytics tracking number, no matter how long you have had it.
Don’t let a new advertising or web firm “wipe the slate” clean because you will lose rich historical data that can’t be compared with a current marketing effort if you start over.
Some communities can create helpful tracking reports year over year to see how sales correlated with specific sources of traffic. If an online source performed well to drive traffic, looking backward is a great way to repeat the sales successes of previous years.