Google Analytics – 3 Key Metrics To Track. What only 3?
But there is tonnes of data. Yes, Google Analytics is daunting when you first start working with it; so, let’s get going by understanding the 3 key basic metrics to track.
What is Google Analytics all about?
It is a free tool from Google that analyses the visitors to your website. From how many visitors, what they get up to, to where they enter and leave your site. All very useful data.
Three key metrics to understand, the questions these raise and what action to take:
Metric 1: How’s my audience doing?
Are site visitor numbers growing is the key question to ask here. Answers can be found under the AUDIENCE tab in Analytics.
Three questions to have answers for about your audience…
Are my site visitor numbers growing?
As said this is the key metric for audience. Growing your visitor numbers is a healthy sign and what you should be aiming to achieve.
How many visitors do I get a day?
There is no correct figure but do your research to try and find out what competitor sites are getting. And then aim to do better.
Are there spikes in my visitor numbers?
If you are getting visitor spikes understand why. It is probably to do with content you are putting onto the site or your social media activity. Content that is bringing visitors, and visitors that is, that don’t bounce off (more about bouncing later in the post) is good – do more of it.
Metric 2: Where are my visitors coming from?
Where your site is acquiring its visitors from can be found in the ACQUISITION tab.
Three questions to have answers for about your visitor acquisition…
What’s the channel mix?
Understand what channels are providing the traffic to your site. The aim is to have a good healthy mix of all four channels supplying visitors:
- Social media (visitors clicking on links to your site from social media platforms)
- Direct (visitors typing your site URL into Google’s search bar)
- Referral (visitors following a link from a 3rd party site)
- Organic (visitors coming to your site from Google search)
Social platform mix?
There is every chance that you are working hard on social media, across several platforms, to raise awareness of your business, cause or passion. Therefore, you need to know which one is bringing the visitors and what content postings in particular are generating the visitors to your site. Successful content and postings – do more of it.
What keyphrases is my site showing up for in search?
This answers the question: ‘what are people typing into search for my site to show up in the results?’
Google Analytics will give you a list of search phrases along with the number of impressions and clicks.
Armed with this data you can now improve your content to get your site to show up for your target keyphrases, get better page rankings, higher click through rates, etc.
Metric 3: What are my visitors doing on my site?
Answers to this question about where visitors are entering, how long they are staying, where they are leaving, etc. can be found in the BEHAVIOUR tab
Three questions to have answers for about your visitors’ behaviour…
What are my top landing pages?
The top landing page will more than likely be your home page, but what are the next several? What share of visitors do they get, can this be improved, what channels are they coming from and are they staying on the site to visit other pages? Improving page content and linking to different landing pages are changes to test to improve engagement with your visitors.
Worst bounce pages?
A bounce is defined as when a visitor enters your site on a page and leaves from that page without visiting any other pages. I regard any bounce rate over 50% as a negative. So, look at your pages to see which ones are the worst and change the content to improve the bounce rate.
Worst exit pages?
These are the pages from which your visitors leave your site. The question to ask here is which are the worst performers. Again, as with the bounce metrics change the content to improve their performance.
Google Analytics is a terrific source of data about the visitors to your site. And, we’ve just scratched the surface of it here to help get you going. Google Search Console is for another post, but just to say here it is very worthwhile linking it to your Analytics account to get search data.
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I hope you found this post useful.
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