Most financial advisors have a strong aversion to trying to understand their website’s metrics through Google Analytics. Why is this, when we know advisors tend to be numbers-driven and analytical in nature? Our best guess is because Google Analytics is jargon-rich, confusing and overwhelming. In an effort to provide users with all the data they’ll ever need, the analytics platform can be difficult to sift through or find anything meaningful.
However, advisors may be more inclined to use Google Analytics if they realize that they really only need to know three things about their website when getting started:
1. How much traffic is coming to the advisor’s site?
2. Who is that traffic made up of?
3. What are those visitors doing?
Getting these three pieces of information is really simple; just follow these easy steps!
How much traffic is coming to the advisor’s site?
To get started answering this question, follow these steps:
1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Select the website you want to evaluate and click on “All Website Data”
3. In the top right drop down menu, select a date range (try the last 30 days)
4. Go to Audience, then Overview to view “Users”
This answers the question “How much traffic is coming to the advisor’s site?” For our example advisor, 381 users have visited the site in the past month. That’s not terrible, considering this is the advisor’s old site that has not been optimized for SEO and has no integrated marketing. However, in the next step we will quickly learn that the total traffic does not tell the whole story.
Who does that traffic represent?
This is where it starts to get interesting, or disheartening, if you are our advisor. To learn who this traffic represents, stay on the “Audience” tab.
To find out where in the world the site visitors are from, go to “Audience,” then “Geo,” then “Location.” You can see from the data here that a vast majority of our site visitors are from outside the United States. A full 100 are from France! The advisor does not offer financial advice in France, so these are not qualified prospects.
Of the folks visiting the site from the United States, about 70% are from California, which is great, since this is where the advisor does business. Unfortunately, this means that of his total 381 site visitors, only 123 were from his target state.
What are those visitors doing?
To find out more about the site visitors’ behavior, navigate to “Behavior” then “Overview.” This section gives a nice summary of which pages are most popular with site visitors.
Unfortunately for this advisor, the data shows that very few of their website visitors are making it past the home page. Only 18 visitors are making it to their blog in the last month! This is typical for an advisor without a proper marketing program in place.
Google Analytics can tell a powerful story with simple information. While this advisor thought he had a successful marketing website, in reality we can see that only a handful of website visitors from his target market in the past month actually consumed any relevant content on his website. Now that he understands this information, he can adjust his marketing strategy and visit his Google Analytics again in a month or so to see if his new strategy is working.
Would you like to learn more about Google Analytics for Financial Advisors? Sign up for our exclusive webinar on Google Analytics now below!