Google Analytics provides us with a wealth of information about our website traffic from where it comes from, what device they used, how long they stayed and what products they purchased.
There’s so much information, in fact, that it can be difficult to know what you should be tracking.
What you should be tracking will depend on the type of website you have and what your goals are. For example, bounce rate is a good metric to track if you’re looking to increase engagement with your content on a comparison site with lots of pages. However, if you have a single page website, there’s not much value in tracking your bounce rate as this will always be high given that Google sees a single page visit to your site as a “bounce”. In theory, everyone who visits your website will only view one page, so seeing a 100% bounce rate is very possible. So, a valuable metric for one business will be less relevant to another, so let’s look at some examples.
Example #1: You’re creating content and want to build your audience
Metrics to consider tracking:
- Avg. Session Duration – this gives us some indication as to how long people stayed on your website. If this is just a few seconds, you’ll know that they’re probably not reading and engaging. If they’re staying for a few minutes or more, you know they’re more likely to be engaged.
- Pages/session – as with the Avg. Session Duration metric, the number of pages viewed in a session can give some indication as to how engaged a visitor was with your content. The more pages they viewed, the better.
- Bounce rate – A bounce (as we’ve said above) is simply a single page visit. This isn’t always a bad thing (as we explain here), but if your site has lots of content to consume, you’d expect to see a lower bounce rate as visitors will feel compelled by your content to view more than one page per visit.
- Goal conversion rate for email sign ups – if you’re creating content and sharing via social channels, you’ll want to see a proportion of that traffic make it onto your email list so you can keep in touch with them and build an active subscriber base. Measuring your goal conversions will give you some indication as to whether your content is hitting the spot and whether people want to receive more of it directly into their inbox.
Example #2: You have a sales page where you capture leads from advertising
Metrics to consider tracking:
- Source/Medium – if you’re paying for advertising from different sources, you’ll want to keep tabs on where your leads are coming from so you know if you’re getting a good return on your advertising spend. So, be sure to set up conversion tracking and use your acquisition reports to see which sources are generating the most leads.
- Goal conversions – ultimately the number of leads you’ve generated through your website.
- Goal conversion rate – tracking the percentage of visitors who convert from each traffic source will give you an idea of the quality of the traffic you’re sending to your website through advertising.
Example #3: You have an e-commerce store selling products
Metrics to consider tracking:
- Bounce rate – people leaving your website after just one page view can suggest zero engagement and, more crucially, no sale. So, we need to reduce bounce rates and increase engagement on the website to ultimately sell more and generate more revenue.
- E-commerce conversion rate – changes to your conversion rate could indicate issues with the quality of traffic you’re driving to the website, stock issues, or even usability issues with your website.
- Transactions and Revenue generated by source is where you’ll want to spend some time to identify if you’re investing in the right platforms to promote your products. Do you spend hours on Instagram when actually you generate more sales through Pinterest? Keeping tabs on which sources drive the most sales will mean you can focus your marketing activities on revenue generating platforms.
There are hundreds of reports available in Google Analytics, but the key is to identify the information that will be truly valuable to you and your business. Think about what you want your website to do, whether it’s generate sales, leads or build an audience, and find the relevant reports in Analytics. Don’t get hung up on metrics that don’t provide any insights into your website’s performance. Keep your reports simple and use the Dashboard feature to collate your reports into one place.
You can find detailed tutorials on how to analyse your Google Analytics reports in our online Academy!
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