Google Acquisition Reports
SME media Acquisition reports are aimed at helping you understand how your website is performing and where your traffic is coming from. You should know whether your visitors are finding you via a search engine, social media platforms or by directly entering your URL into Google. Acquisition reports provide incredible real time information to help you gain a clearer understanding of your business and give you a glimpse of the users’ Acquisition-Behaviour-Conversion (ABC Cycle).
What exactly is the Acquisition-Behaviour-Conversion Cycle?
Think simple. We want to know where your traffic is coming from, are your visitors staying, browsing or leaving immediately? This is all classed as ‘visitor behaviour’ and lastly; we want to know how many of your website visitors are converting into leads. These are the three most important factors to ensure a healthy online business presence.
‘Acquisition’ best describes how visitors arrive on your site. These include: Acquisition overview, channels, all traffic, all referrals, campaigns, keywords, cost analysis, AdWords, Social and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Endless statistics can be collected from analysing all of the above sub-sections but today, we will discuss the Acquisition Overview.
“Your Acquisition Overview contains enough information for you to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your lead generation and marketing strategy is working.”
What is the Acquisition Overview?
The Acquisition Overview details everything you need to know about where your visitors originated from, how they found your website and your visitor-conversion rates. Do not underestimate the importance of this information! This can help us structure the perfect marketing strategies tailored to suit what people are actually looking for! Having access to all this information is very useful if we monitor progress and take the necessary steps to maximise results.
If you have a look at your Overview, you will notice it’s split into two sections:
Section 1 (above)
What information does the first graph/chart/statistics show?
The top three search types (organic, social and referral) are very important so that you can balance your marketing efforts across numerous channels. You should not rely all your marketing too heavily on one channel because if you think about the reality; Facebook (for example) could tweak an algorithm at any time and all your traffic could dry up.
Here’s a short explanation for each of the following search terms:
Organic | This is when sites appear on search results pages as a result of relevant search terms being typed in by internet users looking for your service. Non-organic search results would include those appearing as a result of paid advertising.
Referral | Referral traffic consists of visitors that have been generated as a result of being directed through another website. These can really help you understand which external sources are great for helping you progress online.
Direct | A direct session occurs when someone has accessed the site from a direct link. For example, maybe they know your site and typed in your address straight away or clicked on a link through an e-mail, Word or PDF document.
Social | This channel focuses on all traffic generated to your site via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If somebody sees a post, an image or a Tweet with your website displayed and then click on it, this will show up in your ‘social section’ in your Google Analytics report.
Sessions | Number of visitors to your website during the chosen period
Conversions | Typically the most important metric for showing whether or not your website is meeting your business objectives
Section 2 (Above)
For each channel (listed on the left you will find the following:
Acquisitions
This covers the total visits to your website and what number and percentage of these are new visits/sessions.
Behaviour
This shows the ‘Bounce Rate’ for each channel, which can help you gauge how well users from each channel interact with your website and visit more than one page. Here, we can also identify traffic sources that have a high bounce rate. This can suggest that users are arriving at your website and then leaving immediately because they don’t find it relevant and so do not proceed to look at other pages.
Within the Behaviour analytics; Pages/session is the average number of pages viewed during a session and the average time visitors spend on your site
Conversion
A conversion is the conclusion of an activity on your website that is important to your business’ success. ‘Conversion’ is typically the most essential metric for showing whether or not your website is meeting your business goals. Conversions usually refer to sales (checkouts), leads (in the form of completed Contact Us forms), user registrations, and other actions users take that measure your website’s effectiveness in persuading them to take the desired action.
WE CAN HELP YOU MAXIMISE RESULTS ONLINE
If you are running a business and need a new website or marketing strategy, just get in touch with one of us here at SME Media and we will help you get started. If you have any questions relating to how you can improve your current business performance online, we can help you with your development plan. Just call us or leave a message. We look forward to hearing from you.
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