Menu
Google Analytics - What Metrics You Need to be Looking at.
If you currently run a website then you will most likely have heard of Google Analytics. This tool provides you with data from your website on its performance. When running a website, it is invaluable to have this information to understand the state and quality of your traffic. This comes in handy to understand what’s going on and how you can increase sales, and leads through digital marketing. Google itself describes the platform as essential to customer insights.
As a digital marketing agency, the first thing we ask new clients is for access to their Google Analytics accounts. This is to understand the current state and track performance of our campaigns in the future. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve hired us for Google Ads management or our SEO services, or any other service. Using Google Analytics allows us to see what’s working and what isn’t and ultimately provide them the best ROI possible.
So what metrics should you be looking at? All that data can be daunting and most don’t know where to begin. Here are nine metrics you can focus on as well as where to locate them in Google Analytics. Most importantly, how you can make use of them. But first, let’s break down Google Analytics so you can navigate it effectively.
Google Analytics
To keep things simple, Google Analytics is sorted into four different sections.
- Audience: You can explore who your current users are such as their demographics, device technology, location, and so forth. With this information, you can analyse the effects on user segments.
- Acquisition: This shows how your users get to your website, as in how you acquire them. You will be able to see what channels yield the most traffic as well as compare them.
- Behaviour: This shows what your users do while on your website, as in how long they stay and what pages they click through. You can analyse this information to further understand the effects on retention, engagement, and their overall experience.
- Conversions: This keeps track of whether users do what you want them to do while on your site. This can assist in seeing how effective your funnels are for purchases, for example, and see how your site encourages this.
Now, let’s take a look at the metrics you should be assessing.
1. Users
‘Users’ refers to how many people visit your website and they are split into two groups: new and returning. New being first-time visitors and returning being users who have visited your website previously.
This is tracked by the use of cookies which is data that’s collected from your time on the site. Keeping this in mind, it is important to note that although the use of cookies is effective, it is not 100% accurate. This is even more relevant now that cookies are going. Say the user visits your site but from a different device/browser and they have blocked the use of cookies. This means their visits will be marked as a separate new user. This also occurs if Incognito or private browsing is used.
To access this metric, you can find it under the Audience > Overview section in your Google Analytics. In this section, you can also find information about new users, number of sessions per user, page views, and more.
All this information is great for analysing your marketing strategies as it shows how often users interact with your site. Another benefit is that the data gives insight on how effective your campaigns are to drive traffic. For example, when a client hires IM as a social media agency, we can follow the user journey through this.
2. Sessions
The metric for sessions refers to the number of times users are active on your site. They start when a user first lands on the website and end when there is thirty minutes of inactivity. It can also end when a user enters through one campaign, exits, and then re-enters via another campaign or past midnight. Although the default time is thirty minutes, you can adjust how much inactivity will cause a session to end. This can be done via your Google Analytics Session Settings.
The way sessions differ from the user metric is, for example, there are 100 users and there are 200 sessions. At a glance, it suggests that each user visited twice on average during a specific time period. This metric is useful to track changes to your session count rate to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. There must be a reason why people are more inclined to re-visit under different campaigns. Sessions help pinpoint what source is bringing you traffic that will stick around longer. Under sessions, you can also see the average duration, as well as the average amount of pages visited per session.
Access to this information can be found in the same place as users – Audience > Overview.
3. Devices
This metric tracks your visitors based on the different devices used. These can be either through mobile, desktop, or tablet devices. The reason why this metric is of use to you is that it can show you where to focus your efforts. Your website may look great on desktop but the data is showing that people mainly come through mobile devices. As smartphones have driven more people to browse online on-the-go at a higher frequency, this is a relevant scenario. According to StatCounter, Mobile market share (56.45%) has surpassed Desktop (41.15%) as of March 2022. You will then must optimise to improve that particular experience. Mobile optimisation is a key factor in our website design services.
To find this metric, you go through Audience > Mobile > Overview.
4. Average Time On Page
As the title states, this metric covers the average time a user is on a single page. By looking at this average, you get an idea of how engaged they are with that particular content. With this information, you can clearly see which pages are working and which clearly aren’t. For instance, you have a page that needs more traffic so now you can find ways to increase it.
This could look like adding in videos, changing the layout, or making it more accessible from the home page. This way, you can see what content is working and what isn’t.
If you are running an SEO Services campaign, track the average time to ensure a good landing page experience. If people are exiting after only a few seconds, this gives Google an indication that your content isn’t relevant. Thus, it can significantly damage your rankings if you don’t improve user experience and average time on page.
To find this information, you can go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Page > Avg. Time on Page Column.
5. Organic & Paid Sessions
These two metrics go hand-in-hand. Organic traffic is from users who came to your page via non-paid search engine results page. IM Creative is an SEO agency that works to increase the number of quality organic traffic to your website. Paid traffic is from users who have clicked on one of your ads on a search engine. IM Creative also offers Google Ads management services to increase the volume of quality paid traffic to your website.
Organic traffic gives you an indication of how effective your current search optimisation strategy is. This kind of traffic is what you want to increase as a cost-effective long-term strategy. The Paid search metric is great as it shows how effective your advertisements are currently. From this information, you can gauge and tweak the paid ads and even reduce the costs over time.
Comparing these two metrics is a start to seeing your site’s overall performance and if any improvements can be made.
There are also other sources that can be identified through channel overview. If you’ve hired a social media agency, you can check the number and quality of traffic it’s generating. The same principle goes for email marketing and tracking users from that particular source/channel.
All these metrics can be found under Acquisition < Overview, Channels and Source/Medium.
6. Landing Pages & Page Views
The first metric refers to the pages that users enter your site through, also known as landing pages. This is useful as it shows what pages are receiving the most traffic and which are not. This can be a result of organic rankings or driven by your campaigns actively pushing traffic to any particular page. You can use this to evaluate the user’s experience on the site, your marketing, and the quality of the content.
Landing pages metric can be found under Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages.
For page views, it is referring to how many views each page is getting on your site. If a user views a page more than once, these are counted as individual page views. There is also the unique page views metric which is closely linked to this as well. It takes note of the number of times the pages are viewed during a session.
To access these, go to Behaviour > Overview for page views and unique page views.
7. Top Queries in Search
This metric gives you all the words that were searched in the search bar of your site. As you can imagine, this gives you insight into what users want to know or find. It is also a great indicator of what keywords people are interested in. You are able to track their queries as well as see if your content is satisfying their needs.
To find this metric, go to Behaviour > Site Search.
8. Goal Conversion Rate
Firstly, goals are what you set up for your site. Typically, these can be around purchases, form submissions, or even how many pages a user has visited. There can be plenty of things! So the above metric is basically how many of these goals are achieved on your site.
This metric allows you to measure how effective your current campaigns are at delivering results. From the user metrics, you’ll be able to see the different factors around the success and failures.
It’s very important that you set up conversion goals that enables you to accurately measure return on investment. In particular, this is something we do for all of our Google Ads management clients.
You can find this metric in Conversions > Goals > Overview and then use the dropdown to access.
9. Bounce Rate
A “bounce” is when a user visits your site but doesn’t interact and only visits one page then leaves. This user doesn’t trigger anything else that would be recorded by Google Analytics. So the Bounce Rate is calculated as a percentage of all the sessions that were bounced.
Depending on the page, a good/ bad bounce rate varies. You will have pages that have been set up with the intention to drive traffic around your site, for example. If this page has a high bounce rate (70% and over) then this is a clear indication that things need to be tweaked. A high bounce rate almost always indicates poor relevancy and/or user experience. One way to combat this is you can sort out the data to try and find any underlying issues.
Importantly, a digital marketing agency should focus on creating the right message and advertising to relevant audiences, on your behalf. This is the number one way to reduce bounce rate supposing there are no technical issues.
To find the Bounce Rate information, you can go to Audience > Overview. To view the individual pages percentages, you can go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.
What are the Limits of Google Analytics?
Google Analytics gives you invaluable data about your website’s user interactions. All this information from the metrics can be used to your advantage to optimise your marketing strategies. But even with all this, it is important to know the limits of Google Analytics.
It works as great insight and provides guidance around your website traffic BUT it is not always 100% precise. We recommended leveraging other tools alongside Google Analytics.
You can add a user-tracking tool like Hotjar for heat mapping and recordings.
Google Analytics can seem difficult to navigate for many people. Industry jargon and an overwhelming amount of data can make it difficult to digest information.
Hiring a digital marketing agency that’s truly passionate about helping with your online presence can help maximise Google Analytics benefits.
