Using Google Analytics to Inform UX Decisions
How are your users finding your content? Are they coming to your website from a search engine? If so, which one? Are they arriving on your homepage first, or are they landing on an interior page of the site that’s loaded with keyword-rich content?
Understanding how users are actually navigating your site's content (rather than assuming/postulating) plays a major role in continually refining your site's user experience. Google Analytics provides a lot of insight along these lines for no charge - and initial setup/configuration is a breeze by embedding a code snippet in your header/footer template.
Analyzing this raw data will really force you to start thinking about things like:
- Why is this content generating so many pageviews?
- Does this content align with our goals and mission?
- How can we leverage this content to better align with our internal goals?
- How can we get users more quickly and easily to this sought-after content?
- What pathways are users taking to get around the site?
- Is my main navigation really effective?
Knowing the answers to simple questions like these -- reaped via analysis of granular patterns in your users’ behaviors observed in Google Analytics data -- is a natural starting point for us.
For example, if our team learns from Google Analytics data that the majority of your users are viewing your website on a mobile phone, we’re going to make different decisions about layout and content placement than if they were all coming from the web. Similarly, if you’re considering using a lot of Flash animation in your website, we’d want to know how many of your viewers are trying to access you using an iPhone or iPad (neither of which currently supports Flash).
Browser statistics are also exceedingly helpful in properly focusing your development effort -- if only a fraction of your users are viewing your website in Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0, we may recommend designing for IE versions 7.0 and up and pushing the limits of interactive functionality. On the flip side, if the majority of your users are checking out your website on older browsers, we would typically want to avoid newer Javascript-heavy technologies.
From an information architecture standpoint, if we learn from Google Analytics that 75 percent of your incoming traffic never makes it past your homepage into those meaty interior pages of your website, we have to ask ourselves “Why?” Perhaps your homepage is reaching the wrong audiences, or maybe it’s current layout is overwhelming to your users. Sometimes, simple A/B testing of adding elements like content-heavy chunks of prose with substantial keywords can create changes in behavior, which then informs our recommendations.
You can also leverage the Google Analytics API to help drive lists of popular content on our sites, since many of them utilize a CDN which prevents database writes (therefore page view counts stored in Drupal are much smaller than the actual number of page views).
In the end, Google Analytics can work through the entire web design and evolution process. The data it provides about your users helps us answer crucial decisions in the planning stages to ensure a more effective website and user experience.
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