Google Analytics is a leading on-site web analytics tool available today to arrive at the actual performance of your website primarily from a commercial perspective. Insightful details from Google Web Analytics can help you plug the gaps on how your website interacts with its intended audience.
Let us explore the following 10 important things that you must track from a Google Analytics account:
- Page Views – Page views are the number of instances of a browser reloading a web page.
- Absolute Unique Visitors – Google Web Analytics uses cookies to ascertain an ‘Absolute Unique Visitor’. It is a user that has previously never visited the web page.
- Repeat Visitors – A great feature to find out if you are getting repeat visitors. A higher repeat visitor count would often indicate towards the popularity of your website.
- Visitor Behavior – Tracking visitor behavior can give valuable insights into the level of engagement with your website. The average amount of time a visitor spends i.e. session time is often analyzed.
- Traffic Sources – How are visitors coming to your web page? This is an important question that Google Analytics looks to address. You get an overview of different sources that are sending traffic to your website i.e. ‘Direct Traffic’, ‘Referring Sites’ or ‘Search Engines’.
- Entry Page – The first page that any visitor uses to gain access to your website is dubbed as the landing page or ‘Entry Page’. A web page with a higher ‘Entry Page’ count often indicates towards the popularity and effectiveness of that page.
- Exit Page – A web page from where a user leaves your website is termed as an ‘Exit Page’. Page with the greatest exits can point towards a page with errors or unappealing content. This will not be true in cases where the exit action is triggered by a ‘Thank you’ page as it indicates completion of an activity.
- Bounce Rate – This perhaps is the most interesting of the features. Bounce rate documents the percentage of visits wherein a user entered a page and left the website on that page itself.
- Frequency v Recency – Loyalty of your website audience is often measured by tracking frequency of visits. It is calculated by dividing total visits by the total number of unique visitors. Recency lets you analyze loyalty of visitors on your web page.
- Top Content – A comprehensive content drill down analysis is what is offered by analyzing the ‘Top Content’ section on your Google Analytics account. You can get insightful information related to the most visited web pages, top landing & exit pages. For instance, if the ‘Time on page’ count on a web page is higher this would show the appeal of the web page to your target audience.
Google Analytics is a free to use on-site web analytics service provided by Google Inc. There is a premium version that comes with a fee. Google Premium lets savvy marketers translate data into insights and further convert it into action. Whatever choice you eventually opt for, a website integrated with Google Analytics can give you valuable insights around which a profitable online existence can be structured. To learn more visit our Google Analytics Training program.
