Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that offers an in-depth look at your website and business. It can initially seem intimidating, but with this guide and a bit of practice, you’ll be tracking the most important metrics quickly.
You can access real-time reports once your account is set up and the tracking code is on your site.
Pageviews
If you have a website, you know that Google Analytics guide provides an invaluable set of reports. These include a variety of important metrics, such as Users, Sessions, and Pageviews. Understanding how these metrics relate to each other and what they mean for your business is important.
In a nutshell, pageviews are the number of times Internet users view a specific Web page. A unique pageview is recorded each time a user visits a page on your site. If a visitor goes to page A and back to page B, it will still count as two unique pageviews.
Pageviews are different from hits, which are typically related to file requests on a server. High page views do not necessarily equate to broad reach. They can indicate a usability issue if visitors find pages difficult to navigate or find what they are looking for. For this reason, it is often important to track events in conjunction with pageviews.
Conversions
Google Analytics tracks visitor actions on your website by dropping cookies in the visitor’s browser. This information is collected and then displayed in different reports. Depending on your business needs, you may be looking to track conversions, such as a user signing up for your newsletter, filling out a form, or making a purchase. This can be done through the goal-tracking features of Google Analytics or by using a more visually sophisticated tool, which offers funnel presentations and other graphics to better report on conversions.
Another way to improve your understanding of website traffic is to compare your performance against your competitors. Google Analytics provides a competitive analysis feature that models competitor data based on the behavior of real but anonymized users. This gives you a clear picture of how well your top competitors perform on their websites. This can help you determine the best strategies to optimize your site. You can find this report in the Overview tab of Google Analytics.
Time on Site
Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most popular and trusted website tracking services. It’s free, easy to use, and helps you analyze your site performance from all angles.
A large part of your success online depends on how much time people spend on your site. You want to ensure they are engaged, finding what they are looking for, and taking action on your site. But you also want them to spend less time that they leave because they get bored or need help finding what they need.
You can look at the Average session duration report to determine how long your visitors stay on your website. This metric is calculated by dividing the total session duration by the number of sessions. This metric excludes visits that end in exits or bounces (where users close their browser or type another website into the URL bar). The report also displays the average session duration for each page on your site. This can help you identify pages that keep your visitors’ attention longest and which ones don’t.
Session Duration
You can measure how long users spend on each page of your website or app by tracking average session duration, the fourth most-tracked metric in Google Analytics. Understanding how this metric is calculated can help you make better decisions about your site’s content, design, and features.
When someone looks at one page and then leaves your site, their session ends in 30 minutes (unless they click a link or interact with the site in some other way). If they did not visit other pages, their Time on Page and Session Duration are reported as 0.
However, what if that user had gone to your products page and added something to their cart before going out for lunch for 31 minutes? That would trigger a click event and start a new session. Adding this to the mix can greatly alter the measurement and meaning of your Time on Page metric. As a result, it is generally considered less helpful to use as a key performance metric than other Google Analytics metrics like Bounce Rate and Pages / Sessions.
Site Performance
If you’re in a marketing role or work as a consultant for clients, one of your responsibilities is to track website traffic and conversions. You can do this through Google Analytics, a free tool that inserts tracking code into your website’s HTML.
Google Analytics provides much data on your site’s performance, including the number of visitors, where they are coming from, and what pages they visit. You can use the data to improve your site and make business decisions.
For example, you can use the data to find out which keywords drive visitors to your site and optimize your content for those keywords. You can also compare the data from different periods to see year-over-year or month-over-month trends. Google Analytics can seem complex and confusing at first, but it’s well worth learning the basics so you can make informed marketing decisions. Start by creating a Google Analytics account and adding the tracking code to your website. Then, follow the steps in our short and sweet Google Analytics tutorial to get started measuring your website performance.
