Analytics is a free tool from Google that collects data as visitors come and go from your website. This powerful tool offers child care business owners insight into how people interact with their website and can help identify opportunities for improvement. Using a string of code installed on every page of your site, Google Analytics tracks details like how people arrived at your website and how long they stayed there.
Visit https://analytics.google.com/ and take a look at these three elements to start optimizing your digital marketing efforts and site performance! When analyzing your data, make sure you use a time period that’s long enough, perhaps a month, six months, the year to date or the amount of time since your last site redesign.
Where is my website traffic coming from?
In Google Analytics: Acquisition –> All Traffic –> Channels –> Default Channel Grouping
Google Analytics’ acquisition tool breaks your website traffic into the channels that lead your website visitors to your site. Most likely, the list of channels driving traffic to your site includes direct visits (people who typed your website’s domain into their web browser), organic search traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, paid search, display and referral traffic (people who were “referred” to your website from another website by clicking a link). You may also see an “other” category, which includes everything Google isn’t able to classify another way.
You probably had a hunch about how the majority of your website visitors were finding your site. Now you know for certain. With this data, you can determine what marketing efforts are most effective at driving website visitors.
There may be channels you thought were successful that aren’t actually resulting in a ton of website visitors. This could be cause for concern, but don’t panic yet! Instead, dig deeper.
What channels lead to goal completions?
In Google Analytics: Acquisition –> All Traffic –> Channels –> Default Channel Grouping
Remain on the same view as the previous section and look beyond the number of users to the conversions section. When you built your website, you probably identified goals. It’s possible to configure Google Analytics to record when these goals are completed within your website. If this feature is enabled on your site, you’ll be able to see how many people per channel completed the goals you identified.
Now, you have more information and can better identify which channels are working to increase enrollments at your center and which can be improved.
Compare Landing Pages and Goal Completions
In Google Analytics: Behavior –> Site Content –> Landing Pages
You can also compare pages (instead of channels) with conversions. This will give you an idea of which pages on your website perform well and which pages do not. Using this insight, you can begin testing design and messaging to increase conversion rates.
Where are my site visitors located?
In Google Analytics: Acquisition –> All Traffic –> Channels –> Other –> Metro OR City
Because your child care center is a local business, you’re trying to target families near your center. You can evaluate the success of the tactics you’re using to reach local parents using the metro primary dimension. This sorts all the people visiting your website by their metro-area.
You can also sort by city, instead of metro, for a more specific look at your site visitors’ location.
