Have you ever opened a closet just to have a pile of junk fall out on you? You know, hypothetically speaking. Maybe you’ve slid the door open only to be met with a falling box of baseball hats. Especially if you have a 12-year-old son that’s obsessed with hats, but not obsessed with putting things away correctly. Point being, at first glance his room looked good. It usually does, but I should know better than to open the closet without a shield… definitely some room for improvement.

But let’s be optimistic, chilly Fall nights are quickly approaching. Have you ever pulled out a jacket from last season and found a $20 bill folded up in the pocket? Yeah, me either. I’d settle for a dollar but who am I kidding, I’d spend it on the kids anyway.

Somewhere along the line we’ve all found something unexpected. Something buried beneath the surface, good or bad. Data is the same way. Google Analytics gives you SOO much data. At first glance it gives you a complete overview, and everything may look great. But you will never truly see the health of your site unless you start digging for the hidden numbers. Some discoveries may present opportunities and others help reinforce a successful strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at a few places to uncover your hidden google analytics data.

• Bounce Rate. Lower = better, right? Not quite. A bounce rate that’s too low could indicate problems with your install.
• Referral traffic. Sure, it’s great to see that X% of your traffic is from referrals. But what does that really mean? If you dig in, you may find that you are self-referring traffic to your own site and need to adjust your Analytics install. This points out some room for optimization. Or, maybe there is one external site that is consistently sending quality traffic your way. That’s awesome, keep it coming! It presents a great opportunity to target those readers and concentrate on relevant content.
• Count of Sessions. Do you know how many times your readers come back to your site? Maybe your goal is an immediate contact, but maybe you have a longer sales cycle so it takes a few touch points for them to convert. Take a peek at the count of sessions. You may find that readers who return two, three, or four times are not only spending more time on your site, but maybe that’s when they reach out for a quote. New opportunity? Of course. Maybe it’s time to dig into a remarking strategy to stay in front of interested audiences and encourage that repeat visit.

The list goes on and on. There are so many metrics captured by Google Analytics, it’s important to know where to look, what to dig into, and what actionable items you can walk away with. Stay tuned in the coming months while we look more closely at the wealth of info that you can discover under the surface. From these examples to on-site searches and audience demographics, when you fully understand the data you’re looking at, you can fully capitalize on it. Of course, you don’t need to dig in alone; we’re happy to do the dirty work. We can help organize the data and build a strategy to move forward. Because the only thing better than finding cold, hard cash in your coat pocket is realizing that you can optimize the cold, hard marketing dollars that you’re already spending.