Google Analytics is a must-have tool for every marketer and knowing how to use it properly can make any SEO project easier. Opening an account in it is easy - especially when it is free. But knowing how to use it properly means you need to spend time getting familiar with it. GA gives you over 200 metrics across the entire funnel from lead acquisition through conversion. Getting this large amount of data is great - but what should you be looking at? To help you with just that, we have curated a list of the most important metrics from GA that you can use to help grow your website and business.
‘Users’ in Google Analytics means unique visitors on the website or mobile app. This is displayed by default on the dashboard and is also under ‘Audience > Visitors'. Any new visitor on your website is assigned a unique client ID stored as a cookie by their web browser. Note that if the user deletes the cookie - such as by clearing the cookies or by using a different browser, it would be counted as a new visitor.
Under 'Acquisition > Overview' resides one of the most important metrics - the Acquisition Overview section. This helps you learn about the various traffic sources - direct hits, organic search, social media, and referrals. You can use this to figure out what is working on your website and what needs improvement.
The Acquisition Overview section also tells you about the number of sessions, bounce rate, and a lot more. Not only does it tell you where the traffic is coming from, but it is also useful to get insights into how users are engaging with your content.
The 'traffic sources' section will expand as your visitor base grows. A good strategy here is to keep a tab on the highest traffic-generating sources while working on some of the underperforming areas that have a high potential for improvement.
A session begins once a user loads the webpage, ending after a 30-minute inactivity period. Each click, pageview, and transaction that is tracked at this time is included in the session. When the same visitor comes back a few hours later or the next day, it is treated as a new session. There may be a discrepancy between sessions and visits - so this is not the best method for tracking unique visits.
The Average Session Duration gives you the mean of all session times divided by the total number of sessions. This tells you how much time visitors are spending on the website on an average.
This gives you an idea of the number of pages viewed by a visitor in 1 session. It is located under Audience > Overview and is a good proxy for overall user engagement. Using this in combination with the Average Session Duration will give a more accurate analysis than using either of these metrics alone.
If a user landed on your website and navigated away from it within seconds, then that would increase your bounce rate. The bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors who triggered just a single request from Google Analytics. This means they only visited a single page on your site and navigated away from it - meaning no other page views and conversion.
Any action can be set as a goal - from simply visiting a specific page on the website to signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. You can create your own goals or even use community-made goals. The Solutions Gallery has more than 3,000 of them - you can browse through it to find helpful ones. Once you set up goals, tracking goals competition helps you analyze your website’s overall performance.
Goal Completion gives you a running total of the times a visitor completes some specific goal on the website or mobile app. The goal can vary depending on the business and website - ranging from going to a specific page to signing up to a newsletter or making a purchase. You need to create goals before you can track this metric. Using this along with the percentage of visitors completing a goal (making a purchase or signing up) gives you an idea of how well conversions are going.
As the name suggests, Google Analytics is tracking the number of views that each page on your site gets. When a visitor lands on a page, it counts as a pageview. Reloading the page, navigating away, and then coming back to the same page all count as pageviews on the same page and by the same user. This metric helps you see if both new and returning visitors are accessing your website’s content. This is helpful to measure the effectiveness of email, social media, and other campaigns.
This metric tells you the pages that receive the most pageviews. This can be used to evaluate the quality of content, efficacy of marketing campaigns, and the overall user experience on your site . It is located under ‘Behaviour > Landing Pages’. Use this together with ‘Exit Pages’ ( which we’ll cover next) for better analysis.
Exit Pages gives you a list of your website’s exit pages - the last page that a visitor views before navigating away from your website. This must not be confused with the bounce rate - these are related but not the same values. A higher exit rate means that the page in question is causing you to lose potential customers.
If you have an email tracking setup in Google Analytics, you can use it for analyzing the performance of your email campaigns. This is located in ‘Behaviour > Events & Overview’. Under ‘Top Events’, choose your newsletter to view its metrics. You can break down this data by the device type, giving you more insight into whether it is working better on mobile devices, tablets, or desktops.
Advertising metrics can be tracked in Analytics too, by linking your Google AdSense account. Once the accounts are connected, this data is under Behaviour > Publisher. It tells you about the revenue, and the clicks and impressions. Use this to track and optimize the revenue of individual pages.
These are by no means all of the metrics under Google Analytics - but are some of the basic ones that you must be familiar with. Analytics can help you define and optimize your success strategy once you know what to look at and how to use it - and understanding these metrics is how you get started with that.