* We originally featured this post on Medium.
The first thing you’re usually told when building a website/startup or any type of company with an online presence is “install Google Analytics”. Right, you need to install Google Analytics but many forget to mention that you also need to pay attention to your stats, and act on them.
Most will login once a day or once a week depending on the amount of traffic they get, take a quick look at the overview, click around for maybe a minute or two in order to feel like they’re actually using Google Analytics and then that’s it. If that’s what you’re doing then what’s the point? May as well remove Analytics from your site so you can stop wasting time “checking” your stats.
The issue is that most don’t know the power of Analytics and how to use it in order to make educated decisions which can and will eventually increase conversions, engagement and so on.
We’ve been getting lots of traffic at Bablic.com (a website localization startup I’m a part of) mostly thanks to a great, unexpected, feature on ProductHunt and the hype that came with it (thanks again Kevin William David for the submission). Here’s what I’ve learnt from spending about an hour on Google Analytics analyzing the traffic that’s been coming in, and things you should be looking into as well in order to increase your conversions.
What I’ve learnt from my stats
Bare with me here, this will be a mix of points and explanations.
Browsers
Safari 8.0 1.53% Try Now (convert)
Safari 8.0.6 17% Try Now (convert)
Clearly, a major issue with Safari 8.0. Once fixed, 10x more people who use Safari 8.0 are going to click the Get Start Free button on our homepage. There are other browser issues, such as horrible conversion rate on Chrome version 42.0.2311.90 but they all fall under the same category. Take some time so look at your goals/conversion rates on each browser, and then thoroughly test the browsers which are under performing by a lot.
Resolution
Thanks to properly analyzing my stats and seeing that 1366×768, 1024×768 and 768×1024 perform terribly in terms of time on site, bounce rate and of course conversions, I’ve learn that we had a major responsiveness issue.
Screen Colors
Still trying to make sense of this, if anyone can share some insight regarding this please leave a comment or tweet-me. It seems that on 24-bit screens, 10.32% convert for us, yet on 32-bit screens only 2.64% convert. Haven’t had the time to properly test this or fix it but at least properly reading my stats helped me be aware of this major issue I’d probably never know about.
Countries
Before logging into Analytics and properly taking a look, I was convinced (as is probably everyone else) that US traffic was the best converting one for me. Surprise, surprise! US traffic was the worst for us, yet we’ve been seeing amazing results from countries in Europe and Asia, even Canada was better performing that the US. That is probably the 1st time, in over 10 years of online marketing, that I’ve seen Vietnam traffic outperform US traffic.
User Experience
These could easily be the most important things I’ve learnt, and they help me/us make major changes on the website. Some of our most important features are barely even being used, and that could only mean one thing, they are presented properly. Our “Options” button, in the Bablic Editor, is barely being clicked and that’s bad news since our “Add Languages” feature is part of the Options menu. We’ve also noticed more people left-click in our editor instead of right-clicking, yet right-clicking is what allows you to manually translate of all the elements such as text, images and even css. That’s a clear issue that needs to be addressed quickly, if it wasn’t for the stats I wouldn’t think much of it because to me it is clear I need to be right-clicking, but now it’s crystal clear that to my users it isn’t.
Dissect your Analytics, trust me!
Those are just some of the things I’ve learnt by diving deeper into my Analytics, as a company we’ve obviously learnt way more thanks to Analytics and we keep learning every day. Learning isn’t enough, it’s important to act on the things we learn and to act them quickly. I hope this quick post provided enough information for all of you to log in to your Google Analytics account right now and look over all of it’s features and so on. You installed Google Analytics for a reason, use it, make the best of it. It’s only a powerful tool if you pay attention to it.
***Keep in mind, this is my first post on Medium so I hope you enjoy it, if you did please share! You can also keep up with me on the Bablic blog or Twitter.
Bablic is a unique website localization solution, try it now by entering your website on our homepage and don’t forget to bookmark our small business blog.