Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools offered by this powerhouse when it comes to understanding the performance of your financial advisor website. Without this free service, it would be very difficult for financial advisors to understand the most important results for website KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) without paying for another service provider.
While other service providers may offer different data sets, for financial advisors who want to understand the most important performance metrics for their website, there’s no beating Google Analytics.
Read on for more information about Google Analytics, and how it can help improve the results that are produced by your financial advisor website.
How to Get Started
Google Analytics is a free service that is available to anyone with a website. Once you register your website, you will be provided a line of JavaScript code that you or your website manager can add to your website.
This code is invisible to visitors, and once activated it will begin to collect data on your website and make it available on the Google Analytics dashboard. If you have multiple websites, or perhaps your blog has a different URL, you can set up Google Analytics on all of your sites and manage them through one dashboard.
What Can Google Analytics Tell You?
Once the code has been placed on your website and the stats start rolling in, you may get overwhelmed with just how much data about your website is available. Don’t let that happen! In fact, it might be beneficial for you to only focus on a few key metrics for your financial advisor website when first getting started. Here are some of the most important metrics for financial advisors to become familiar with in Google Analytics.
From the number of website visitors over a specific amount of time to the most popular pages and where they came from, Google Analytics offers an in-depth look at:
1) Total Visitors to Your Website
This is a great metric to start taking note of right away. Knowing how many people are visiting your website over a given period of time helps financial advisors understand how certain events can affect website traffic, such as seasonal events and holidays, weekends, and specific promotional efforts.
2) Total Visits to Your Website
This metric includes the number of total visits or sessions to your website within a given time period. This total will include both new and returning visitors but gives financial advisors an idea of how many times their content is being seen by visitors who are seeking information about their firms or financial topics.
3) Where Visitors Are Coming From
As a financial advisor with a local focus, understanding where your visitors are coming from on a geographical basis is critical. If you’re seeing a large number of visitors from outside your local service area, or even from another state, it’s worth a closer look.
Perhaps your SEO or SEM advertising efforts are too broad and attract visitors outside of your target markets. Also, it helps to know where on the internet these visitors came from.
Google Analytics can show you if they came from search engines, social media platforms, or even 3rd-party sites through backlinks. Armed with this information, you can directly see which of your marketing efforts are paying off, and which ones are wasting your valuable marketing dollars.
4) Most Popular Content
You may think you know the most popular content on your financial advisor website, but unless you’re tracking it, you may be in for a big surprise. Google Analytics can break down the most visited pages on your website within any given time period and drill down into data that also shows the average amount of time spent on that page, bounce rate (if they left the website after viewing only one page), and if they navigated to that page via a unique tracking code.
5) Conversion Rate/Goal Setting
Getting an accurate conversion rate on Google Analytics does take some work to accomplish, but it is totally worth is. This is because Google Analytics doesn’t know what you consider to be a conversion. In most cases it is converting a visitor into a qualified lead.
Perhaps a conversion to one financial advisor is filling out a Contact Us form, while for another it means booking a meeting through the website interface or registering to receive a free eBook. Whatever qualifies as a conversion on each financial advisor website has to be established on the Google Analytics platform.
Often grouped together as “Goals” within the dashboard, it’s critical for financial advisors to define the action they ultimately want visitors to take. Using the above example, if you consider scheduling a meeting a conversion, then this goal needs to be set up using the page where that action is taken.
Pro Tip: Before defining goals and conversions on the Google Analytics platform, perform internal testing on your website to ensure the forms and links that perform the desired action are working and connecting properly to avoid issues when creating goals.
Using the above key metrics – and likely many others once you become familiar with them – can help you as a financial advisor better understand your sources for new leads.
By understanding who your audience is, where they’re coming from – whether geographically or where they came from on the internet – you can understand how to better create the content and provide the resources your visitors are looking for. Establishing Google Analytics can also help you spot trends for how your website traffic has improved month over month or over longer time periods.
This can be especially helpful when you want to track growth after initializing SEO optimization efforts, new content, the addition of free offers, or a complete website overhaul. Analyzing historical data can also help financial advisors identify any trends that help them plan digital marketing strategies in the future.
Now that you have an introduction into what Google Analytics can do to improve financial advisor websites, the most important step is always the first one - getting started. The sooner you start, the more information you’ll have to make informed decisions about your financial advisor website’s production and enhancements that will improve the performance of the site.
Need help? Don’t hesitate to partner with a digital marketing agency to help you monitor your results.
