Do you have a website for your rental store? Perfect, I thought so.
Do you have visitors to your website? You don't know how to answer...
Having a nice website is cool. But knowing and analyzing the people who come to your website is much better.
Creating the website is 50% of the work. The other 50% is traffic generation. And that's the longest part, and sometimes the most complicated.
A few questions arise:
- Which pages are visited?
- How long do users stay on the site?
- Why are they leaving?
- ...
It helps you understand the behaviors on your site. Understand what you need to improve. You can generate more traffic to your website and therefore more rentals 😁
Let's see how.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is Google's statistical analysis tool. Free and very powerful, it is used by millions of sites and all marketers.
The tool takes all the information from your website and returns it sorted on analytics.google.com.
Google's tool allows you to analyze the evolution of your digital marketing, free of charge. You'll discover :
- Who your visitors are
- What they do on your site
- When they visit your site
- Where they come from
- Why they come to your site
How do I use Google Analytics?
Top 5 data to watch and analyze as a rental company :
1. Number of visitors
Users: allows you to find out how many people have visited your site during the period you've defined. This data is the best-known part of Google Analytics, and should be monitored closely to see how your traffic is evolving.
New users: located next to it, takes into account a visitor's visit only once during the period, even if they come several times. This is the difference with "Users".
Sessions: corresponds to the number of times your site has been visited. The more different and varying the number of users, the more regularly they visit your site.
To access these figures on Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
2. Visitor acquisition
This section tells you where your visitors come from.
Organic Search: from natural results (mainly Google search)
Direct: comes from direct entry of the url in the search bar to the site (this also includes people who have bookmarked your site ⭐)
Referral: comes from a site offering a link to yours
Social: from a social network (Facebook, Instagram)
Email: comes from an email
To access these figures on Google Analytics: Acquisition → All traffic → Channels
3. Visited pages
Take a look at your site's most visited pages. Determine which are most relevant to your audience. If you want to push content that gets very few hits, repurpose it to make it more visible.
To access these figures on Google Analytics: Behavior → Site content → All pages
4. Time spent on site
Average session length determines the average time spent by each visitor. The higher it is, the better, and the more relevant you'll be in Google's eyes for better SEO.
To access these figures on Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
5. Bounce rate
The bounce rate is when a visitor comes to your site, and leaves the page without consulting any others. In general, try to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.
A good technique for improving this is to engage your visitor's interest by proposing other content/pages. Add links to other pages on your site.
But above all, remember: the more relevant your content, the lower your bounce rate.
To access these figures on Google Analytics: Audience → Overview
The Lokki example
A little concreteness. Let's take a look at the Lokki data.
Psst, we've tampered with the data, so we won't tell you everything. But they're still concrete and relevant to analyze.
Here's the acquisition over the last 3 months. Most of the traffic comes from direct traffic, in this case emails. The organic part, i.e. search results, accounts for 1/4 of traffic. Getting organic traffic is important, as it shows the relevance of your content to Google.
(Other), corresponds to traffic that Google Analytics is unable to categorize.
Let's move on to the pages visited and analyze each column presented:
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, on average +5 minutes. In particular, it has a bounce rate of less than 25%.
Overall, this page is relevant, and visitors stay on it before consulting other pages. The page's internal link network is set up so that visitors don't leave the page. And that's what we want from this page. To discover more about Lokki.
The other pages have a lower session duration. The /locationvelo page has a very high bounce rate, but we don't necessarily want visitors to continue their visit after viewing this page.
💡- Le conseil de Lokki
It all depends on each of your objectives. Determining concrete, measurable objectives will make your analysis easier.
How do I install Google Analytics?
Are you being monitored by a web agency that created your website? Ask them to install Google Analytics on your site (it should take them 15 minutes).
If you've got a handle on your website, here are a few tips, depending on the CMS you're using.
- You're on Wordpress: Install Google Analytics on Wordpress
- You're on Wix: Install Google Analytics on Wix
Don't try to understand all the parameters of Google Analytics (unless you have the time 😉 ). The indicators seen above give you a good basis for tracking your website's traffic week by week or month by month.
Analyze and improve your pages, and your traffic will grow sustainably. If you don't use Google Analytics, you're missing out on a free tool that can help you grow your rental business.
