Top 5 Statistics to Watch in Google Analytics

When you’re a website owner and want to ensure that your web presence makes an impact, there are a few tools that you need to become familiar with, and one of these is Google Analytics.  This is a tool that can provide you with a wealth of statistics on website traffic so that you can figure out which aspects of your site are working and which may need a little more help.  Although there are many different metrics to evaluate in Google Analytics, consider the following statistics to make the most of your presence on the web.

Visits

The “Audience” section in your Google Analytics dashboard should be the first thing you evaluate. The “Overview” tab within this section will show you how many people are visiting your website, how many pages they are visiting and for how long.  You can set specific dates to evaluate different periods of time. You can also review your website’s overall “bounce rate” which is the measure of how many people are coming to your website and leaving without visiting another page (a good bounce rate should stay below 50%). If your bounce rate is too high you will want to think about design and structure changes which will help lower the bounce rate.

Who?

The “Audience” section can also be used to give information on exactly who is visiting your website.  Obviously it does not give you a name and address, but it can tell you if the same people are visiting your site time after time and how many of your web visitors are there for the first time. This section be broken down further to give you demographics about your audience, interests, geography, technology, and more.

How?

Take a look at the “Acquisition” section to find out just how people are making their way to your website.  It will tell you what percentage of visitors find you through a search engine (organic search), how many are making their way to your site through referral traffic and how many are just simply typing your web address into their browser (“Direct” visits).  Google Analytics also offers you the opportunity to get further into this information and then you can figure out what you need to boost each one.  For example, if you seem to be getting very little traffic via a search engine, it could be that you need to improve SEO so you move higher up the search results.

Which?

Google Analytics can also provide you with a contents breakdown, so you know which of your pages are getting more views than others.  For example, a page on how to create a great Christmas lunch will get more hits towards the end of the year but may not attract any attention at any other time.  With this in mind you know that seasonal pages have their value but a variety of content is important.  When you find out which topics people are interested in you can tweak your site to match.  The “User Flow” section can show if people are entering your site on a specific page and if they are taking the time to browse other pages or if they are exiting after seeing just the one page.

This blog just scrapes the surface of Google Analytics reporting, but we hope you found it helpful. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me, Amy Grishman at amy@socialfocus.com. Thank you!