Do you have a website for your rental shop? Great, I thought so.
Do you get visitors on your website? You're not sure...
Having a nice website is cool. But knowing and analysing the people who come to your website is much better.
Building the website is 50% of the work. The other 50% is generating traffic. And that is the longest part, and sometimes the most complicated.
A few questions come up:
- Which pages are visited?
- How long do users stay on the site?
- Why do they leave?
- ...
Answering them helps you understand how people behave on your site, and what you need to improve. You can bring more traffic to your website and therefore more rentals 😁
Let's see how.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is Google's web analytics tool. Free and very powerful, it is used by millions of websites and by every marketer.
The tool collects all the information from your website and presents it, neatly organised, on analytics.google.com.
Google's tool lets you analyse how your digital marketing is performing, for free. You find out:
- Who your visitors are
- What they do on your site
- When they visit your site
- Where they come from
- Why they land on your site
How to use Google Analytics
The top 5 metrics to watch and analyse as a rental business:
1. Number of visitors
Users: tells you how many people came to your site during the period you selected. This is the best-known Google Analytics metric, and you should follow it closely to see how your traffic is changing.
New users: shown right next to it, this counts each visitor only once over the period, even if they come back several times. That is the difference with "Users".
Sessions: the number of times your site was visited. The more this number differs from the number of users, the more regularly those users visit your site.
To find these figures in Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
2. Visitor acquisition
This section tells you where your visitors come from.
Organic Search: comes from unpaid search results (mainly Google search)
Direct: comes from people typing the URL straight into the address bar (this also includes people who have bookmarked your site ⭐)
Referral: comes from a website that links to yours
Social: comes from a social network (Facebook, Instagram)
Email: comes from an email
To find these figures in Google Analytics: Acquisition → All Traffic → Channels
3. Pages visited
Look at the most visited pages on your site. Work out which ones are most relevant to your audience. If you want to promote content that gets very few views, rework it so it is more visible.
To find these figures in Google Analytics: Behavior → Site Content → All Pages
4. Time spent on the site
Average session duration tells you the average time each visitor spends on your site. The longer, the better, and the more relevant you will look to Google, which helps your search ranking.
To find these figures in Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
5. Bounce rate
A bounce is when a visitor lands on your site and leaves the page without viewing any others. As a rule, try to keep this rate as low as possible.
To improve it, a good technique is to spark your visitor's interest by suggesting other content or pages. Add links in your pages that lead to other pages.
But above all, remember: the more relevant your content, the lower your bounce rate.
To find these figures in Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
The Lokki example
Let's get practical. Let's look at Lokki's data together.
Psst, we've tweaked the data, we're not going to reveal everything. But it is still realistic and worth analysing.
Here is acquisition over the last 3 months. Traffic comes mainly from direct, which here corresponds to emails. Organic, meaning search results, accounts for 1/4 of traffic. Getting organic traffic matters: it shows Google that your content is relevant.
(Other) is traffic that Google Analytics cannot put into a category.
Now let's move on to the pages visited and analyse each column shown:
The first page, "/", is the home page. It generates 60% of the site's traffic. Above all, we can see that users stay on it for a long time, more than 5 minutes on average. And it has a bounce rate below 25%.
Overall, this page is relevant: visitors stay on it before viewing other pages. The page's internal linking is designed so that visitors don't leave. And that is exactly what we expect from this page: that visitors go on to find out more about Lokki.
The other pages have shorter session durations. The /locationvelo page has a very high bounce rate, but we don't necessarily want visitors to keep browsing after seeing that page.
💡- Lokki's tip
It all depends on your goals. Setting concrete, measurable goals makes your analysis much easier.
How to install Google Analytics
Do you work with a web agency that built your website? Ask them to install Google Analytics on your site (it should take them 15 minutes).
If you manage your website yourself, here are a few pointers depending on the CMS you use.
- You're on WordPress: Install Google Analytics on WordPress
- You're on Wix: Install Google Analytics on Wix
Don't try to understand every Google Analytics setting (unless you have time 😉). The metrics above give you a good basis for tracking your website traffic week after week or month after month.
Analyse and improve your pages, and your traffic will grow steadily. Not using Google Analytics means missing out on a free tool that can really help you grow your rental business.
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