Google Analytics (GA) is a powerful application that has a staggering array of metrics and testing tools for your website. For beginners, these tools can be overwhelming. In this Google Analytics Guide for Beginners, we’ll cover four tools that are easy to use and are crucial metrics for finding out how effective your website is.
4 Basic but Powerful Google Analytics Tools
1. Visits: See how many unique and returning visitors your site had.
If you don’t look at another metric again, at least watch this one carefully. Site visitors are essentially people in your sales pipeline, and the more the better. After a few months of watching this number, you will be able to tell if your other marketing efforts are working (spikes in visits).
Why this is so important: You’ll start to make out trending patterns that can tell you a lot about your audience. Do they visit more on the weekends or during the week? Do you get more visits at the beginning of a quarter or at the end?
2. Bounce Rate: This number shows you whether a visitor left your site as soon as it loaded, or if they went on to view more pages.
Bounce rates work like this: If a visitor lands on a page, and clicks a link to read more, you will have a 0% bounce. If a visitor lands on a page and then exits, that will count for a 100% bounce. Typically, you want to see a low bounce rate on your report. A good goal is to keep it under 50%. In GA, you can see the bounce rate for your total site and for each individual page. We find the individual page bounce rates much more useful.
Why this is so important: If you have a page that has a high bounce rate, it is a signal for you to start examining why people don’t like that page. What can you do to change the page so that people will be more interested and dig further into your site? Note: Blog pages are an exception to this rule. It’s common for blog pages to have high bounce rates because your visitor is there for the sole purpose of reading that particular post, then they are off to something else.
3. Page Views: See how many pages were viewed on your site, and what those pages were.
When you dig a little deeper into your GA reports, you can find out what pages are being viewed the most, and which pages are acting like dead space.
Why this is so important: If you have extremely important information on a page that has very few views, this will alert you to the need to move the information or make the links to that page stand out more.
4. Goals: Find out if any action was taken on your website.
Wouldn’t it be great to know how many people downloaded your free report, or how many people made it all the way to the end of your poll? Goals are an easy way for you to find out how your calls to action are performing.
Why this is so important: The best use for Goals is to spot pitfalls in your conversion process. With Goals, you can find out where people are abandoning their cart, or spot pitfalls in your information collection form. Goals work best when they are used in a longer process because you can track each step individually.
Having analytics on your website is essential for making sure your site is as effective as it can be. We include Google Analytics in every website we build as part of our FTR6.0 development process. Your website launch is just the beginning, and if your not using Google Analytics, be sure that you’re using something to analyze your website.
About the author: Jeune Ortiz is VP of Marketing and Creative Director at future-ink. With more than 20 years of experience in graphic design and marketing, Jeune brings extensive knowledge and creativity to each website and internet marketing solution to grow your business.
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2 Comments
Web dizajn | February 4, 2010
Very nice teext! You help me very much! Thx!
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