Google Analytics for membership: How to use data to make informed decisions

Understanding your customers is a challenging and rewarding venture as a creator. You may find yourself wondering how people find your website or which products people buy most often. It's always easier to use data to help you make powerful decisions to impact your bottom line and it's easy to Google Analytics for membership management and data tracking.

Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to understand the people visiting your website. Once you’ve added Analytics to your website, you’ll gain valuable insights about your visitors and marketing campaigns. The entire setup process takes only a few minutes. With this data, you can make informed decisions that turn visitors into customers. Get your website to work for you by using these three Google Analytics reports.

How people find me: Acquisition reports

You don’t have to be a Google Analytics pro to understand how your audience finds your site. One of the main dashboards that Analytics offers is the Acquisition dashboard. You can answer a few of your most important questions by clicking the Overview option in the Acquisition section of your Analytics account.

This dashboard shows you how people find your website. It also includes all the marketing campaigns you’re running to drive traffic to your site (like paid search campaigns, email campaigns, or organic traffic). You can use the data in this dashboard to answer questions like:

• Are people clicking on my ads to find my work?
• Is my email campaign effectively driving people to my website?
• Which channels work best for my business?

Seeing how each of your channels perform is a great way to focus on what’s working in your advertising. It will also help you change your course of action if you don’t see the results you’re looking for.

If you’re running paid advertising on platforms like Google Ads or Bing, you can click Paid Search on this dashboard to see which keywords perform best for your business. This helps you focus on the products, brand terms, or search terms that lead people to your site. Use this information to adjust your bidding prices on keywords in your advertising platforms.

What people do when they come to my site: Behaviour reports

When using Google Analytics for membership, GA's Behaviour reports give you a more focused look at how people interact with the different pages of your website. You’ll be able to see:

• How many unique individuals visited your site, and how often they return
• How long visitors typically spend on a specific page
• Which pages are most people on when they leave your site

One of the more visual reports in this section is Behavior Flow. This map shows you which pages on your site people are most likely to land on first, where people click to next, and how many people leave your site from a specific page.

This chart is a great tool in understanding the people who are interested enough in your product to come to your site. If you’re seeing the majority of people drop off after the first or second page, you should consider updating those pages to keep people engaged and capture their business.

How website visitors convert: Goal reports

Tracking conversions is key to understanding how website visitors become customers. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean that they purchased something from you, and could include an action like signing up for a newsletter or subscribing to your blog.

Understanding your conversions takes a little more work and setup, but the payoff is monumental. To start using Goals tracking when using Google Analytics for membership, you’ll need to create Goals in Google Analytics that correlate with your expectation of a customer. For creators showcasing their work, we’d love to see all our website visitors add something to their shopping cart and check out. Goals help you understand how often people are completing the desired behavior.

If you’re already tracking Goals in Analytics, the most important thing is to ensure that your conversion rate is as high as possible. Low conversion rates typically show that website visitors aren’t engaged or finding value, thus not converting. High conversion rates speak to quality traffic from quality sources. As your business grows and your offerings change, keep an eye on your conversion rates. It’ll help reassure that you’ve made good marketing decisions!

Confirm your instincts with data

As creators, we want to know that our customers have an exceptional experience when they engage with our product and brand. If they can’t easily find us, they can’t easily purchase from us. With Google Analytics for membership, you can make powerful decisions to impact your bottom line. Your creations are absolutely worth it.