If you’re wondering how Google Analytics can be applied specifically to your bank, this follow-up post is just for you! Let’s cover just a few of the many ways it may be useful to you and your bank.

Website Traffic Reports

With website traffic reports, you can identify what channels the most visitors to your site. This can be extremely helpful in determining where you need to focus your time and money.

You can see if your social media ads are effective, if your SEO content is successful, or even if your online advertising campaigns are working as hoped. If your goal is to improve your marketing effectiveness and attract new customers for your bank, then Google Analytics is an essential tool.

Inside Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels and you’ll be able to see exactly where your visitors are coming from.

What It Means: In the above screenshot, you can see the top five channels for traffic to this bank’s website, with Organic Search being the main driver of visitors (1). However, this also counts those that go online and may even enter your bank’s domain in a Google search and then click on the result instead of simply entering the URL in the address bar - so be careful of what the data is really telling you!

You can also see (2) that while Referral traffic is third on the list, it’s responsible for way more Sessions on the site. This means that people who are referred may actually be a pretty valuable Channel (unless, of course, that Referral is simply customers getting “referred” back to your website after they log out of Online Banking)! 

And finally, with the lowest bounce rate of the Channels we’re looking at just over 40%, it would be nice to know what “Other” (3) means and who they are. You can dig in further to see what makes up this Channel. They are sticking around and looking at more pages on your site than any other Channel, so they may be interested buyers (and you should get to know them better)!

Market Demographics

If you plan to open a new branch, or just want to assess your reach with customers in your current area, then location reports from Google Analytics can be a helpful partner.

Maybe before having the ability to determine visitor location, you noticed a lot of traffic to your website, but not much interaction or growth. This could have been due to the fact that a lot of traffic to your site came from sources outside of your intended reach. With location reports and having the ability to identify where your site traffic is coming from, you can more accurately develop your plan to attract your target market.

Visit Audience > Demographics > Age to get access to the above data (but you can check out the Overview or Gender options as well).

What It Means: For the bank example above, you can see they have a pretty equal distribution of site visitors age ranges from 25-54, then dropping off a bit in the older segments. However, their smallest segment is in the 18-24 range and that may be an area to focus on to help attract younger customers to the bank and not lose them to the neobanks that, in many cases, have much fancier apps and a “cooler” experience than a traditional bank does. 

Insight on Optimization

With mobile devices being so readily accessible, more and more web traffic comes from mobile users. Google Analytics offers reports to help you see just how much of your site’s traffic is from these mobile users. Plus, you can check trends over time and to determine growth rates.

This is useful for determining if your site has effective mobile optimization. After visitors come to your site, if analytics shows that mobile users interact with your site much less than web users, it may be a sign for you to improve your mobile functionality.

Landing Pages Report

The Landing Pages Report allows you to observe where your users most often arrive when connecting from Google results pages. This is an important metric because you can determine how effective your landing pages are, and what content needs to be improved to increase traffic or retain visitors.

You’ll find your Landing Pages information by visiting Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

What It Means: One of the “issues” with this bank’s activity may be the fact that over 83% of all traffic to the website starts either right at the homepage or the “exit” page of their online banking service. This may be an opportunity to look deeper into an SEO strategy with more attractive content that can be discovered and generate inbound traffic. What this tells us is that most of the visitors to the site are already customers - so as they say “the glass is half full” to expand and grow its organic visibility! 

Since most of your visitors will be coming to login to their online banking, many will likely be starting their visit on your homepage. However, beyond the homepage, highly visited landing pages will correlate with a high Google search ranking. If you want to shift your popular results to other pages, you can use these analytics to determine what content needs to be optimized for better search rankings (and maybe start to think about your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy).

A Powerful Tool for Your Bank

Digital marketing and web optimization are essential for banks that want to see growth and success. Creating effective strategies will require utilizing the most relevant data on your customers and initiatives so that you can know what works and what needs improvement.

Google Analytics offers all of the tools you will need to gather the necessary data for your next marketing campaign and to help make the most of it. If you haven’t already, check out their site, and prepare yourself for the opportunity to advance your marketing strategies and effectiveness. 

Need Some Help?

If you’re looking to get started, feel free to get in touch with the digital experts at WSI if you’d like some help. Google Analytics can be a little (ok, maybe a lot) overwhelming - especially when you’re starting out. We can help you set goals for your site, determine the most valuable data for those goals, and create reports that best serve you and your team.

And if you’d like an extra boost of expertise, we can help elevate your online marketing strategy with SEO, online advertising, and also good ol’ fashioned content (organic) marketing, too! Whenever you’re ready, we look forward to hearing from you and lending a hand.