Get the Most Out of Your Website With These Essential Google Analytics Metrics
February 25th, 2019 by
In today’s world, having an online presence is essential to business. With 27,378,962 live websites currently using Google Analytics, most business owners have heard of Google Analytics. But simply knowing about Google Analytics isn’t enough. Learning how to use the platform can provide business owners with insight into targeted audiences and what they think and feel about your products or services. Knowing the details of your customers’ behaviors will help you determine which pages are drawing customers to your site and which pages need some optimizing. Consider these questions to determine what is most important to your business.
What Are People Doing on My Website?
This is a measure of your site’s audience. Tracking your audience reveals who is using your site. When you know the type of person that is visiting your site, you can establish the direction and language of your site’s content and messaging in order to cater to this specific type of person.
Session Duration
This metric measures the amount of time that people spend on your website before leaving. The longer someone’s visit, the more likely they are to convert. Tracking this metric can help you determine which pages are effectively supporting your marketing strategy and which might need to be optimized.
Pages per Session
Like session duration, pages per session allows you to determine whether you are driving the right people to your website. A higher pages/session rate can indicate that visitors are engaged with your content and, therefore, more likely to convert.
User Demographics
This data allows you to segment the people who visit your site based on different criteria, such as their location, age, gender, and interests. Tracking this data allows you to gain a better understanding of who your customers are.
New vs. Returning Visitors
If visitors return to your site, that’s good news. It probably means that your audience is engaged and will be more likely to convert. Even if someone did not make a conversion the first time they came to your site, your brand has made enough of an impression to encourage them to return.
Which Channels Drive the Most Visitors?
This is a measure of your site’s page tracking. Page tracking is helpful to your business because it tell you how your traffic is coming to your site. Understanding this can help you determine which avenues are best for bringing traffic (and hopefully, conversions) to your site. Use this data to make decisions about where you might want to promote your site’s content.
Landing Pages
Reviewing this metric will provide insight into the specific pages visitors are landing on. This knowledge allows you to:
- Pinpoint the most and least popular pages of content
- Track which keywords are most effective at driving organic traffic to your site
- Identify the landing pages and paths that convert the most visitors and share these highly effective pages on social platforms
Bounce Rate
This metric measures the percentage of visitors who landed on a single webpage and then left without visiting any other pages. You can look at the bounce rate of the entire site or the bounce rate of individual pages.
Exit Pages
Exit pages measure the percentage of visitors to a single page that click away and completely leave the website. For a visitor to be measured in the Exit Rate, they must have come to your website, visited multiple pages, and then left. Exit pages are important because they let you see where your traffic drops off.
Pages you want your visitors leaving:
- Form completion thank you pages
- Order completion pages
Pages you do not want visitors leaving from:
- Your homepage
- A conversion form
- During the checkout process
Is My Website Leading to Conversions?
This is a measure of your site’s goal tracking. Creating and monitoring your Google Analytics goals are important to your business because it enables you to track the progress of specific user interactions (that you have pre-defined) on your site. Goals should act as your targets to ensure your website is moving in the right direction.
Conversions
A conversion takes place when a visitor completes an action that you consider important to your business. Examples of conversions could be filling out a form, completing a purchase, or signing up for an email newsletter. You can track these by channel or landing page to determine which sources are leading to the highest and lowest conversion rate. If your marketing strategy includes paid advertisements such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you should also be tracking the cost per conversion for all of your paid ads.
Google Analytics provides you with nearly endless ways to track and review your website metrics. The metrics that most impact your business will depend greatly on your company goals and industry (like tourism and travel, for instance). Once you have identified the Google Analytics metrics that matter the most to your business, you can determine how and where to allocate your marketing budget. A digital marketing agency can take tracking metrics off of your plate. If you’re interested in partnering with Search Influence, request a marketing analysis today.
Images:
Phone screen with Google search
