Getting a better understanding of how people are using your school’s website is crucial to ensuring that parents, pupils and staff get the best out of it and can easily find the information they need.
Google Analytics is a really useful free tool that will give your school the data and statistics it needs to give website users the very best experience.
Information is not only provided in real time, you can also compare periods of time against each other and check month by month on the performance of your school website.
There is such a vast range of information provided by Google Analytics that to become an expert in understanding it all takes time and will more than likely involve training.
However, there are some basic elements that will provide useful insights into your website’s performance and what users are looking at that you can use straight away.
First of all, you will need to set up a Google Analytics account and add some code to your website to make sure analytics can track user behaviour. Your school IT support should be able to help you with this, or we can help as part of our service.
Once you’ve added the code, you’re all set to gain really useful website insights.
Here’s five simple Google Analytics insights and how to use them:
Knowing where your visitors come from is a powerful tool and can inform any school communication strategy. For example, if lots of your visitors are coming from social media channels like Facebook or Twitter etc. you may want to start sharing more information on those channels. You can also encourage social sharing on news and events pages on your website.
Use the Acquisition tool and under ‘All Traffic’ you’ll find ‘Channels’. This will give you an overview where your website visitors come from. You can drill down further into the categories for more specific information such as which social channels are being used etc.
When someone is looking at your school website, they want to find the information they need quickly and easily. Google Analytics provides insights into your website’s content and can identify the most popular pages so that you can make sure they are easy to find.
You might need to change the design of your website to make sure that the navigation is efficient and easy to use. But this will be a good investment of resources as it makes your school website much more user-friendly.
Use the Behaviour tool and under ‘Site Content’ you will find ‘All Pages’. This will give you an overview of the most popular pages on your website and how many people are looking at them.
Knowing how your visitors search can really help you to improve your school’s website. Insights into searches can help you to promote regularly searched content and ensure that prominent links to this content are on your home page. Use the Behaviour tool and under ‘Site Search’ you will find the terms people are using to search your website
Finding out which device your school’s website is being viewed on is an important insight. How your website looks and performs will be different on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Mobile views of websites are increasing and if your school website isn’t responsive (the view changes to accommodate the particular mobile device), not only will this affect your search engine rankings, it will discourage visitors from using it.
Use the Audience tool and under ‘Mobile’ you will find ‘Overview’. This gives you a list of the devices your website is being viewed on. You can also drill down further to see exactly what model of that particular device is being used.
When reviewing your data, Google Analytics allows you to set date ranges. This can be really useful to compare one period to another, to report year on year website performance or to see the effects of any improvements/changes you make to your website. You can also export reports for any date range that you set.
In the top right-hand corner, you will see a date range. If you click on that, you can specify the period of time you want to create a report on. You can use pre-set date ranges, or you can custom apply a date range. You can even be extremely specific – which would be useful to track the performance of a particular school communication or activity. These are just a few insights to get you started. Knowing your website, how it performs and how people are using it is invaluable – the better you understand it, the better your website will be. Finding out what’s popular, learning where your visitors are coming from and what they’re looking for will help you to ensure that you have the best website design and navigation. And while we know there are statutory documents that every school website has to show – if you have information that isn’t being viewed, there’s not much point in you or your staff spending time putting it on there.
Make sure your content is relevant (what people are looking for) and easy to find – make your navigation simple and promote popular content on your home page.
Google Analytics is free and easy to use and is your first step to gaining insights into how your website works and in helping you to improve it.
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