Google Analytics Metrics You Should Know

If you’re reading this post I think it’s safe to say you’ve already added Google Analytics to your website; at the very least you are planning on it. And good for you! It’s amazing to me how often I speak with business owners who have not taken this important step towards having a healthy online presence. Knowing where your traffic is coming from and what results that traffic is producing is crucial information for every one doing business today.

That being said, once you’ve added Google Analytics (GA) to your site you will have to go through a steep learning curve as you try to digest and absorb the massive amounts of data found within. Should you be looking at Acquisition or Audience? Users or Sessions? What is Bounce Rate and why should you care?

Just looking at the home page can raise so many questions, it can be overwhelming. Luckily, you really only need to know how to look at a handful of metrics to get a lot of information out of your GA. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with these, you can move on to more complex uses and applications to get even more benefit out of the account. (If you’re already familiar with GA, you might want to skip this post; it’s really intended for users brand new to the platform).

Users

Let’s start with the most basic metric you should know, one displayed prominently on the Home page of your account. A User is simply a visitor to your website. That’s it! It really is a simple concept, but once you understand the term everything else will be easier to understand.

New Users

This is exactly what it sounds like. How many of those Users we just talked about were new to your site? This metric just gives you that number.

Sessions

Next up is Sessions, also found on the Home page. The number of Sessions reflects the amount of times someone spent time on your site. So for example, you may see 200 Users and 300 Sessions:  this is an indication that a number of your Users navigated to your site more than once, making up a greater number of Sessions than Users.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate shows you what proportion of your users “bounced” from your site after visiting. A “bounce” occurs when a user lands on your site, then leaves without navigating to a second page of your website. This is an excellent indicator of the stickiness of your content and can help guide your overall content strategy and plan (ie., your content may need work if most users bounce off your website after finding it).

Acquisition

Once you have a good grasp of these basic terms, it’s time to put everything together. The best place to start is the Acquisition view; you can navigate to this view from the reports column on the left side of the Home page view. Click on Acquisition; then click on All Traffic from the drop-down; and then Channels. It will take you to a page showing you where the traffic to your site is coming from. For example, you may see rows for Direct (someone typing your web address into their browser), Organic (someone clicking over to your site from Google search results), CPC (if you are running Google Ads), and more.

From here you can break out metrics for Users, New Users, Sessions, and Bounce Rate from each channel. This is extremely useful and will give you excellent visibility on which of your marketing efforts are yielding results and which are not.

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This is a very basic overview of the kind of data you can pull from Analytics. Dive deeper and you can find even more useful information with all kinds of applications. Viewed and used correctly, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you can use to drive results for your business online. And with a trusted partner to guide you can achieve great things!

If you’d like to find out more, or if you have any questions, please click here to schedule a FREE consultation. You can also email me any time at juan.rojas@vdigitalservices.com.