Google Analytics is an ongoing composite of your website’s performance in the form of incredibly rich and detailed data. But where do you dive into this sea of numbers and percentages?
If you’re a business owner or marketing manager, these 3 key metrics will give you a quick but accurate and enlightening look into the quality of your online presence.
Audience Overview
Your audience overview is a great snapshot of who is coming to your website, when they’re coming, and how long they’re staying. It also gives you insight into how many new vs. returning visitors you have and how much content they are looking at once they get to your website.
Why is this important?
If you have a good percentage of repeat visitors and a steady or growing average session length chances are you’re doing something right. Both of these measurements are good indicators of engagement, demonstrating how many people are coming back for more and how long they’re sticking around.
Behavior Overview > All Content
So you’ve got repeat visitors who are sticking around on your site, but what are they looking at? What has your fans coming back for seconds? Your Behavior Overview reports will help you decipher this.
This section shows what site content (specific pages) is receiving the highest number of pageviews and how many of those views are from unique visitors.
Why is this important?
If you invest in SEO, you’ll want to make sure those keywords are doing some work for you! Google Analytics ranks your top performing pages in any given time period so you can reassure yourself that your strategy is working, or reassess your approach. Plus, you’ll gain insight into which blog posts are most popular amongst your readers, helping to guide you with future posting.
Bonus Terminology
Bounce Rate: the percentage of people who land on a specific page and then exit from that page without interacting with it at all.
Exit Rate: the percentage of people who exit from a particular page. They may or may not have explored other areas of your site before exiting.
Acquisition > Channels
Your site is really rolling: you know who is coming to your site and what they’re reading. Now you need to know how they got there. Acquisition Channels gives you the breakdown of how your visitors are finding your site through organic search, referral, direct, and social traffic. Dig deeper into any one of these categories for even more detailed information, like your top referring social sites, which landing pages visitors are accessing directly, and more.
Why is this important?
Like any good marketing or advertising campaign, knowing and understanding your metrics is extremely important in determining the success of the campaign. If you are investing time and money on inbound marketing, social, or SEO, you’ll want to know if and how they are working for you. Acquisition will help you assess which channels are delivering your customers to your doorstep.
The Point
There is a wealth of information in Google Analytics, so much that it can appear intimidating on the surface. But, if you can start to peel away just the top layers of the data, you’ll get a peek inside the behavior of your online visitors, empowering you with the knowledge to grow and improve your online presence and their online experience.
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