Analytic Metrics
Look At These 5 Google Analytics Metrics First Before Anything Else
The best and most successful websites are those built in equal parts high quality content and solid and good understanding of your audience lifecycle marketing.
Even though you might have first class content, if you have no idea where your traffic comes from in the first place and you don’t know what topics catch the interest of your audience, you are actually missing half of this important formula.
With the help of Google Analytics, you can find answers to all your questions through an analysis of your site traffic. This way, you will be able to improve your website according to the actions that your visitors make.
To get the best out of Google Analytics, you need to make yourself familiar with the most critical metrics that it provides. Google Analytics serves as the bread and butter of all our WordPress design projects.
And this is not just about tracking all the results of your hard work but even the information that you could acquire from it way before you start a brand new user experience project.
Even though you have set it up in the most basic way possible, this can still give you lots of helpful answers.
In this article, you will be introduced to the first five metrics that you need to check when starting a new project.
Goal Conversions
You need to set up goals for you to get started with tracking. However, most founders and marketers would have done this exactly these days.
On the left portion in Google Analytics, you just need to proceed to Conversions then Goals. On this section, you will see all the Goals that were set up for the site or other things that have business value for the products. You could also pull all the Goals in the rest of the views for you to see the number of conversions that you got from Instagram, for example.
Interests and Demographics
When it comes to design projects, among the most crucial things you need to discover who your current users are, not just who you wish them to be, that is actually a different thing most of the time.
To know this, all you have to do is proceed to the Audience section then go to Demographics, Interests, and Geo. This is something that is super important when designing a website.
Desktop/Mobile Split
The Desktop/Mobile Split is yet another metric that you need to check. Once again, you can do this by going to Audience then Mobile. Why do you need this, you ask? This is to primarily prioritize if you will design desktop or mobile first.
Behavior Flow
Afterwards, it is time for you to look into Behavior Flow. To find this, just go to Behavior then Behavior Flow. This will give you an insight to the actual journey that users take from the moment they arrive on the site, the most famous landing pages, the page from where they convert, where they drop, and so much more. It can take some time to analyze primarily because you have to know the specific question that you want to answer with the data. It is also an extremely useful and helpful guide for your website architecture.
Funnel Visualization
This is something that you need to set up along your sales funnel, before you could see any significant data. You will be able to see how a user has navigated to achieve the desired goal with the use of the predefined steps that you have expected them to. The reason why you need to check this is for the purpose of seeing where your users don’t convert and drop instead. It will give you clues about the user experience problems that you should address.
Other Metrics to Consider
Aside from the above 5 metrics, there are still other Google Analytics metrics that you should and need to check
- Acquisition Overview
The section for Acquisition Overview can be found at Acquisition then Overview after logging into Google Analytics. This lets you monitor traffic sources such as direct hits, organic search, social media, and referrals and compare all of them.
This is among those sections where you will spend most of your time. This also contains information regarding the percentage of new sessions, number of sessions, average session duration, bounce rate, and more. This also gives you an overview of your traffic users and the way users engage with your website.
After setting up some goals, you can monitor your goals and conversions in the Acquisition Overview as well.
- Social Overview
To find the section for Social Overview, just go to Acquisition then Social.
The tab lets you measure what Google Analytics calls social relationships or the effect of social media on your website. Google Analytics does this through giving you information regarding the networks where your content is getting shared, your website’s flow of users, and your on-site user engagement.
Unique goals can also be made for tracking social media’s value to your conversions.
- Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of your website is the representation of the number of users entering your website only to leave after they view one page. To see the bounce rate of your website, just go to Audience and Overview and check under the main graph.
An average bounce rate can vary a lot from one type of website to the next. But, if you have something elevated, you might be dealing with a problem.
- Traffic Sources
Traffic sources can be found under Acquisition, All Traffic, and Source/Medium. The section gives you a complete overview of your sources with the use of a simple table. Every row details to one traffic source and includes new sessions, total sessions, average session durations, and bounce rates.
As your site grows, you will also see a growth in your list of traffic sources and trying to keep track of them can get complicated. It is recommended to focus on monitoring your performance across the top sources and probably focus on some underperformers that might see a great potential if you improve them.