Have you ever wondered how many visitors your site is attracting, where they were coming from, or even which specific pages on your site are the most viewed? Well good news! There is already something keeping up with that information for you, and that is Google Analytics!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a tool that tracks and reports website traffic. This means that it will show you where people are coming from to view your site, what pages they visit, how long they were on your site, etc. Which in turn can help you figure out who your target audience is, which pages are the most popular on the site, and can teach you how to make your site more effective for your visitors.
Do I have to install it?
No! It’s actually already pre-installed for all our websites. And since Google Analytics can give you a clear picture on what is working for your site and what could be improved, your next step should be using this tool to help maximize your site’s traffic.
What does all of this mean?
Once you’ve logged in, you will start getting reports of the different areas of your site and how to improve it. Seeing all the graphs and charts can initially be confusing or even intimidating at first. Don’t worry! We’ll go over the basics with you to better help you understand how to navigate through it all to better help Google Analytics work for you and your site. To better be able to understand how to read your reports through Google Analytics, it’s important to understand what’s important to look at and what it means.
What parts are most important to me?
The most important parts of Google Analytics is understanding how many times your website is being viewed, how long it is being viewed, and what pages are being looked at. This can information can be seen in the audience overview report, pageviews, average session duration, and the bounce rate.
Audience Overview Report
The Audience Overview Report is a snapshot of how your website is performing. Sessions represents the number of times your website was accessed by someone. Users is the actual number of people accessing your website.
Pageviews
Pageviews are the number of pages viewed on the website as a whole. Pages per session is how many pages a user visits on average when he or she accesses your site.
The Average Session Duration
The Average Session Duration is how long those users stay on the website during a session.
The Bounce Rate
The Bounce Rate is the percentage of users that leave the site after visiting only one page. For example, if you had ten visitors come to your homepage and three of them did not visit any other page, then your bounce rate would be 30%, which means 70% of your visitors visited more than one page on your website. Google Analytics can be very helpful on understanding your audience and how to market to them. It can also help you know which pages of your site are most popular and which ones are the least viewed so that you can better adjust your site to fit the needs of your audience.
