Google Analytics is an important free tool that you need to utilize as a financial advisor. If you regularly check and understand Google Analytics, it will help you to be more effective in your online marketing, better understand your website’s performance, and make changes that improve your SEO and the user experience. If you aren’t checking to see how your website is performing periodically, then you aren’t going to understand what aspects of your website need tweaking and what is working for you.

Google Analytics is installed on at least 10 million websites, is used by 64% of the Top 500 US Retailers, 45% of Fortune 500 companies, and 55.9% of the top 1 million domains.

But does it work? What are the most important Google Analytics metrics for financial advisors? How does your site compare to others in the industry? Read on to learn more!

GA4, The Next Generation of Google Analytics

GA4 is a new property designed for the future of analytical measurement by Google. A new measurement tool that’ll collect event-based data from both sites and apps. This new property will allow for better measurements and analytics by:

• Collecting both website and app data
• Using event-based data instead of session-based
• Including privacy controls that include cookieless measurements
• Making use of predictive capabilities to offer guidance without complex models
• Using direct integrations to media platforms to drive actions on websites or apps

GA4 will be implemented on July 1st, 2023, and all current standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer process data.

How to get started with Google Analytics 4

There are three ways to get started if you are an editor or administrator:

Option 1: Set up Analytics data collection for the first time

Do this if you’re new to Analytics and ready to collect data for your website and/or app.

Option 2: Add Google Analytics 4 to a site with Universal Analytics (Analytics “classic”)

The GA4 Setup Assistant will add a Google Analytics 4 property alongside your existing Universal Analytics property. Your Universal Analytics property will continue to collect data. You can access both using the property selector in the Admin area.

Option 3: Add Google Analytics 4 to a website builder platform or CMS (content management system)

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics works by tracking tags, which are small pieces of JavaScript code embedded in your website. When a user lands on your website, this code becomes active and starts collecting data on how they interact with your website. Google then takes this data, collates it, and displays it for you in a report via the Google Analytics admin interface. You can even set up multiple reports for multiple websites within your account.

What Data Does Google Analytics Say About Your Website?

With over 10,000 metrics, you can view your site! Here are a few examples:

• How much traffic is coming to your website?
• Where is your traffic coming from?
• What are visitors doing once they are on the site?
• Which of your blog posts are the most popular?
• Where are your site visitors located in the world?

While there is a plethora of data provided by analytics, we wanted to break down the most important aspects that financial advisors should pay attention to. Here are nine KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and sections in your Google Analytics tool that we suggest advisors become familiar with within the Dashboard:

• Average Number of Total Visitors to Your Site Per Month
• The Number of Pages a User Will Visit
• The Three Most Visited Pages on Your Website
• Bounce Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Real-Time
• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior

Average Number of Visitors

This is the number of visitors on average that visit your site. Depending on the size of your advisory firm, you are likely to see different numbers.

Number Of Pages A User Will Visit

This will vary, but typically visitors will visit one to two pages per session. They may be coming to check out your blog section or gather more information about your company. Whatever it is, they generally will spend time just checking out one to two pages.

What Are The Three Most Visited Pages On My Website?

Many times if you are blogging regularly and creating content, your top-ranking pages can be some of your blog posts. But if we’re only looking at more of the static pages, then the 3 most visited pages in order are the home page, the “About” page, and then the contact page, which you might have listed as “Learn More” or “Get Started.”

What Is Your Bounce Rate?

The next thing is the bounce rate. Generally, it’s good to see the bounce rate somewhere between 45% and 65%. If you are blogging a lot, your overall bounce rate might go up because you may have a decent number of people come to your website, read a blog post, and then leave.

What Is A Good Conversion Rate?

What is generally a good conversion rate? If you can get up to just 1% of visitors converting to a booked meeting, that is fantastic. The average advisor is seeing just under 1% and closer to about .75%.

Who Is On Your Website In Real-Time?

Want to know who’s on your website right now? Real-time data gives you access to that data instantly. For instance, let’s say you just gave a presentation, and now you want to see how many attendees are checking out your site in real-time. This is a great tool for watching site visits live.

Who Is Your Audience?

This tab gives insight into WHO is visiting your website. Some important ones to note:

• Geo: This is very important because most firms have a specific geographical scope; therefore, pay attention to your geographical area
• New vs. Returning: This is especially important if you are using your site as a prospecting tool. You want to see who is returning to your website, which may mean they are interested in finding out more
• Mobile: You can see who accesses your website via a mobile device
• Benchmarking: Benchmarking allows you to compare traffic with others in the industry. You can set up your account to be part of the “financial services” industry and look at your data compared to others

Acquisition

This tab gives insight into HOW users find your website.

• Direct: the user types your domain name directly into their browser
• Organic Search: the user conducts a search (via Google, for instance), and your website appears in the search results, which they then click
• Referral: the user clicks on a link to your website from another source (blog, another website, email)
• Social: the user clicks through to your site from a social media platform such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter

Behavior

This tab gives insight into WHAT users do once they land on your site.

• What pages do they enter the site on?
• Where do they go next?
• How long do they stay on each page?
• What page do they exit from?

What are the Most Important Metrics for Financial Advisors?

In our Webinar Replay: Google Analytics For Advisors – Which Metrics Should You Monitor? (also embedded below), we’ve covered:

• Who is visiting my website?
• How are people finding my website?
• What are visitors doing once they land on my site?
• What are the most important metrics for financial advisors to monitor?
• How does my website compare with the activity other financial advisors are seeing?
• How often should I monitor my analytics and make adjustments to my website?

Advisors are often surprised to learn that a typical financial advisor’s site has an average session duration of just under 1.5 minutes!

1. New vs. Returning Users

Ideally, you would like to see a good mix of new and returning users. You’d like to see prospective clients checking you out but also see your current clients coming back to your site repeatedly to log in to their accounts, read your latest blog posts, etc.

2. Bounce Rate

If you have a popular blog, your site-wide bounce rate may be higher as a good percentage of visitors may come to your site, read your latest blog post, and leave. You can work to improve your bounce rate by always linking old blog posts within your latest post. Financial Advisors should aim to have their bounce rate between 40-60%. you should note that single-page scroll sites will ALWAYS be much higher as the user never has to navigate to another page on anything to see all the content.

Ways to Decrease Bounce Rate

1. Check out the bounce rate per source
2. Avoid unnecessary distractions such as too many pop-ups
3. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
4. Continuously create fresh content
5. Cater to your niche

3. Referral Traffic Sources

You should ALWAYS pay attention to what other sites are sending traffic to your website!

4. Organic Search Traffic

This will give you some insight into how much of your traffic is coming from people simply doing a basic search and finding your page. For instance, a prospect may find your website by typing “financial planner in Cleveland, Oh” into the search bar.

5. Average Session Duration/ Average Page Time

People are often surprised to learn that a typical financial advisor’s site has an average session duration of just under 1.5 minutes! You have a very short window of time to make an impression – so make sure your landing pages are optimized to present your Unique Value Proposition and Call to Action!

6. Mobile

If you do not have a website that has been designed to display beautifully on mobile, you need to update your site ASAP!

Over the past decade, mobile website traffic has drastically increased, with overall web traffic accounting for just over 52% of all searches. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then you will likely lose your visitors to the competition very quickly.  We are dedicated to creating websites that are not only beautiful and compliant, but they are mobile-friendly.

Golden Pine Advisors has a beautiful website with strong imagery that looks great, whether it’s on a desktop, iPad, or mobile device.

7. Geographic Location/City

Most financial advisors have a specific geographic location in which they work. By selecting to see how your site is performing for visitors in the specific area in which you are located, you will have a much better idea of how your site is actually performing for your target audience.

An Example of How to Use Google Analytics as a Financial Advisor

Let’s say you spend 5 hours each week writing up 2 blog posts, one on general financial planning topics and one on market commentary. You share both posts via an email blast as well as on social media. The market commentary posts only take 30 minutes to write, whereas the financial planning posts take 4.5 hours. You wonder if it is really worth it to write financial planning posts.

Use Google Analytics to help you decide what to do. With it, you can track:

1. If your market commentary only takes 20 minutes to write but only gets 2 new views each week, whereas the financial planning posts are getting 15-20 new views, perhaps it is worth it for lead generation purposes to keep spending the time.
2. Which posts get people to stay on the page the longest?
3. Which financial planning topics are most popular? Let’s say your college planning posts are always popular. Perhaps you plan a College Planning and Saving series and then link within each post to old posts on the same topic.

Remember that first, you have to install Google Analytics on your site to be able to start tracking it. You won’t have much data at first because it only starts when it is installed, so the earlier you set it up, the better!

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