Google Analytics offers what can seem like an overwhelming amount of metrics to monitor for your website. Knowing what metrics are the most important and give you the best idea of where your website is excelling and where it needs some work is important.
You will never be able to use analytics to take your site to the next level if you’re unsure what you should be monitoring. In this article we will go over some key metrics in Google Analytics you should be monitoring and what they can tell you about your site.
Sessions/users
Location: Audience > Overview
This is probably the most important metric for any website as it just straight out tells you how many people are coming to your site. Sessions tell you how many overall visits your website has received, while users tell you how many unique people have visited your site. Website sessions is like the pulse of your website and monitoring it can help you evaluate your websites performance. If there are any huge spikes or dips in your sessions/users this will give you cause for further investigation.
Pages/session
Location: Audience > Overview
Pages/session is a great indicator as to whether or not your site is engaging the users that visit it. Having a lot of people visit your site is great but it doesn’t really mean anything if users aren’t reading your content or exploring your website.
Pages/session is pretty straightforward, it shows how many pages on average a person visits when they visit your site. Typically you would like users to visit multiple pages on your website per session as it means they find your website engaging. Low pages/session may mean you need to evaluate your site content and/or user experience to get users to engage with your site more.
Bounce Rate
Location: Audience > Overview
Bounce rate is also a great indicator as to how engaging and user friendly your website is. Bounce Rate is shown in a percentage and shows how many users visit your site and then leave without engaging with it. It basically shows if someone lands on your website and then immediately leaves. If your site has a high bounce rate then you will need to invest time in investigating why. Any successful website needs to be engaging for its users.
Goal Completions & Goal Conversion Rate
Location: Conversions > Goals > Overview
Goal completions and goal conversion rate metrics are the quintessential metrics for finding out if your website is completing key conversions. It is important to note doesn’t have goal tracking enabled by default and need to be set up manually. To set up goals you would like tracked you need to visit the analytics admin section and go to the view options, there you will see the goals option. Whether your website’s main goal is to book appointments, take online orders or sell products it is important you set up goals in your analytics to track this. There is a difference between good goal tracking and poor goal tracking. Goals you want to track are a completed user activity important to your business. Items you don’t want to be tracking in goals are things like bounce rate, scroll depth, etc.
Understanding just how well your site turns a visitor into a conversion has a direct impact on your business. Goal completions show how many times the main goals on your site have been completed by a user, while goal conversion rate shows the percentage of users who complete a goal. If your site is not producing many goal conversions or has a low goal conversion rate, then you need to look at how it can be improved to drive more goal completions.
Channels
Location: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
Understanding how users are coming to your website is key information when determining what marketing initiatives are working for your website. Channels will show you the traffic coming to your website from organic search, directly, paid search, referrals, social media, paid social media advertising, display advertising and other sources.
Finding out whether those investments you’ve made in SEO or Google AdWords is paying off is key information. Use the channels metric to understand what is and isn’t working in you digital marketing campaigns.
Landing Pages and Exit Pages
Location: Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages or Exit Pages
Understanding what pages on your website are both bringing users in and steering users away will give you a more in-depth look at which content your visitors find engaging. Landing pages shows you which pages users enter your site on. Pages with good, engaging content will bring in more users.
Exit pages shows you the pages that a user visits last before leaving your website. Pages that don’t engage users are more likely to be an exit page. Identifying pages that have a high user count in the landing pages metric will indicate that is content that users are finding useful. Pages with a high amount of exits in the exit pages metric will identify content users do not find useful. It is also important to note that exit pages can also be logical end points. For example contact us pages can be an endpoint for users looking to contact your business, once they contact you their journey on your site is done. So it doesn’t always identify content users do not find useful.
Identifying well performing landing pages and pages with a high number of exits will tell you what types of content your users relate to most.
Still Don’t Understand Google Analytics?
Don’t worry it can be very complicated. If you still need help understanding how your website is performing the analytics experts at Konstruct Digital can help. We have years of experience working with Google Analytics and can help you understand where your website needs to improve. For more information on we can help with Google Analytics please give us a call.
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