Two Ways To Better Understand Your Website Visitors

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing

Since the start of the pandemic, the landscape has changed for local jewelry stores. Suddenly every jeweler’s website has become much more important for business. But sometimes it’s hard to know how your website is faring. So today, we’re going to talk about two ways to better understand your website visitors.

1. Uncover The Source

The source of your website traffic tells you a lot about your website visitors. Most jeweler websites already have the free Google Analytics installed. We recommend reviewing these numbers quarterly. Whether you check these numbers yourself or have others do it for you, be sure to keep an eye on the “Source/Medium Report” under Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

This breakdown of your website visitors helps to tell you the intent of the visitors. For example, if you have visitors coming from “google / cpc” these are coming from paid ads on Google. That means that these visitors clicked over to specific pages on your site while seeing specific ads and after searching for specific keywords. All a deliberate part of your marketing. 

While these visitors usually aren’t as high as your “google / organic” number, it’s usually more valuable. This is because almost all of the traffic is from interested buyers rather than random searchers.

2. Discover The Content

After uncovering the source of your traffic, you’ll also want to know more about what those visitors were interested in. So next, we’ll discover the content they’ve been viewing on the website. For this, we’ll look at the pages that your website visitors have been viewing by going to the “All Pages Report” in Google Analytics. This can be found under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

Your “All Pages” report is typically set up to list just the ending portion of each page URL starting with the slash. For this reason, the homepage is represented by a slash (/). For most jewelers, the homepage is the most visited page on the site. This doesn’t tell you much about the interests of your visitors, so it’s usually more helpful to look at the other pages to get a sense of what your “top 10” pages are by pageviews.

If the main focus of your marketing and sales is bridal and your engagement rings page has more page views than the others, you know that your results are aligned with your efforts. 

Do keep in mind that sometimes the numbers for a single page or category can be split up between multiple pages in the report. For example, if your engagement rings page is a multi-page gallery with a different URL for each page of the gallery, the views will be split up between each of those URLs. 

Example:
/engagement-rings/
/engagement-rings/page2
/engagement-rings/page3

Mix & Match

Now that we’ve covered both the source of your traffic and the content they’re looking at on your site, we can mix and match those two approaches to get even more insight. For example, you can go to your All Pages Report and break out the content by source/medium. Now you can see which page was most visited by people from each traffic source. Likewise, you can go to the Source/Medium Report and break out the content by page. Do this by clicking the “secondary dimension” dropdown menu and selecting the “source/medium” or “page” respectively.

Honorable Mentions

Google Analytics has an incredible depth of reporting. I don’t recommend getting lost in the weeds. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we also report a few other data points to our clients each quarter. Here are some honorable mentions that you may want to check out.

• Devices Report 
  • Audience > Mobile > Devices
• Queries Report (available when linked with a free Google Search Console account)
  • Acquisition > Search Console > Queries
• Location Report (helpful to figure out if a lot of traffic isn’t local)
  • Audience > Geo > Location

Are you looking for an agency that can help you make sense of your website visitors? Contact suits@fruchtman.com.