{"id":482,"date":"2014-08-18T07:30:49","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T14:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nettsolutions.com\/blog\/?p=482"},"modified":"2014-08-16T18:46:46","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T01:46:46","slug":"google-analytics-part-2-the-5-key-metrics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nettsolutions.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/google-analytics-part-2-the-5-key-metrics\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Analytics, Part 2: The 5 Key Metrics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Data is a hot issue. There\u2019s no question.<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean you need a master\u2019s degree in statistical analysis to keep up. Most small business owners concentrate on their core business first \u2013 and learning a lot of fancy data modeling techniques is nowhere near what they\u2019re going to think about today. But that doesn\u2019t mean you can afford to ignore it.<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re running a website as part of your core strategy, or just as an online complement to your offline efforts, then this article is for you. In just five minutes you should be able to better see how your internet visitor are finding your site, how they\u2019re interacting with it and you should be able to make significant improvements in the results you realize.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve got your Google Analytics tracking code installed<\/a>, here\u2019s what you should be watching for.<\/p>\n

1) New vs. Returning Visitors<\/strong><\/p>\n

This will give you an immediate good idea just how many people your website is attracting every day. They\u2019ll come from all over the Internet. You\u2019ll find them under the Audience\/Overview section. While you\u2019ll probably always have a majority of new visitors, it\u2019s the returning visitors who\u2019ve taken an interest. This metric will always tell you how well you\u2019re doing. Returning visitors should start to increase whenever you\u2019re making significant improvements to the site.<\/p>\n

2) Pageviews<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pageviews is the default report under Behavior\/Overview. It will give you an immediate idea how many pages your average viewer is seeing. Again, you want this number to go up, because you\u2019ll get more engagement, and possibly more business, when your visitors stay and read more pages.<\/p>\n

3) Bounce Rate<\/strong><\/p>\n

Corresponding negatively to Pageviews, is your Bounce Rate. This one is important because it reflects the number of people who do not view more than the one page where they originally land (their Landing Page). You always want this number to go down, and Google recommends really concentrating on bringing this number down as one of the basic goals of all of your SEO activities. You do that by encouraging visitors to visit other pages on your site.<\/p>\n

Not always easy, Bounce Rate is the focus of lots of people in the industry<\/a> from UX pros to designers to programmers.\u00a0 You\u2019ll find the Bounce Rate as a column in the report under Behavior\/Site Content\/All Pages.<\/p>\n

4) All Pages<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the same place as above, (Behavior\/Site Content\/All Pages), you\u2019ll see that the main point of the report is a ranking of the popularity of all of your assembled content. For most businesses, the website homepage is nearly always at the top of the list. It\u2019s where most of your incoming links will direct people and simply the first page most visitors will see.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t get too caught up. All of the statistics across the report are interesting, \u201cAverage Time on Page,\u201d for example. But the default view of the report is a ranking of the popularity of all the pages according to the number of visits any of them receive. Be careful because your newer pages will be automatically ranking further down the list. You may very well learn a lot from those pages as they begin to move up the list.<\/p>\n

5) Acquisition<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lots of SEO people, even the tough ones, are still crying about the loss of all of Google\u2019s Organic Keywords. In the worlds of Analytics and SEO, it was like losing your right hand.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind<\/b>, the Google Analytics world we\u2019re talking about here, is all concerned with the very factors that the latest Google algorithm changes are looking at. So it\u2019s not just keywords anymore. On the contrary, a high Bounce-Rate page, even with just the right keywords, will not rank as high in search results. Google is watching these numbers too.<\/p>\n

The new-ish Acquisition section, though lacking those once insightful keywords, is still a rich place to learn about how people are finding you. The Channels report will become more important as your site develops \u2013 but gives you an instant breakdown of traffic coming in from Referrals, Organic Search, Direct traffic, Social traffic and from a paid campaign if you are buying any ads. That\u2019s just for starters.<\/p>\n

As your site matures, all of your referral traffic will become more important \u2013 and hopefully \u2013 more prolific too.\u00a0 You can take a closer look at specific referral traffic (as well as the other traffic types mentioned above) elsewhere in the Acquisition section. The All Referrals report then is another key metric you want to check. Very useful if you\u2019re getting radically different traffic, you especially want to check here if people are visiting your site for very different reasons. You may want to consider creating, or encouraging them to land on different pages or to custom build more pages for each \u201cvisitor intent\u201d as you come to understand each of them.<\/p>\n

Of course, the five key metrics above are just the beginning. As you learn more about what people are doing on your site, you can learn how to better craft your site<\/a> so as to better meet the needs of your visitors. That, after all, is Google\u2019s intent in providing you with such a powerful tool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data is a hot issue. There\u2019s no question. But that doesn\u2019t mean you need a master\u2019s degree in statistical analysis to keep up. Most small business owners concentrate on their core business first \u2013 and learning a lot of fancy data modeling techniques is nowhere near what they\u2019re going to think about today. But that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailytips","category-search-engine-optimization-2"],"yoast_head":"\nGoogle Analytics, Part 2: The 5 Key Metrics - Nett Solutions Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read "Google Analytics, Part 2: The 5 Key Metrics", the latest online marketing article from Nett Solutions: Orange County Online Marketing Agency.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nettsolutions.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/google-analytics-part-2-the-5-key-metrics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Google Analytics, Part 2: The 5 Key Metrics - 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