What metrics in Google Analytics should you look at
What metrics in Google Analytics should you look at
19th July, 2022 | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) | 0 comments
Today we’re going to talk about Google Analytics and specifically what metrics in Google Analytics you should actually care about.
If you’ve ever looked into your Google Analytics for your website traffic, you can see that it can be a little bit overwhelming. There’s a lot of information there. There’s a ton of data.
Let’s talk about what we feel is the most important things that you should be focusing on when you do go into Google Analytics.
Time is a very valuable resource and you don’t have much of it, but you want to have a good understanding of who’s coming to your site, what they’re doing, how much time they’re spending, and so on.
So what you should be paying attention to.
To be clear, this is definitely not a exclusive list. This is just what we think are the most important things. If you’re not used to Google Analytics and you get overwhelmed by the incredible amount of data that’s there, this can be a good list to start with.
Depending on what industry that you’re in and what kind of website you have, it’s going to vary based off of what’s important. But we think this is a good starter list. For just about every website, these things are going to be important.
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Source/Medium
The first thing that we think is important is the source medium. What we mean by that is what type of traffic’s coming to your site and how they’re getting there, whether it’s organic from Google, whether it’s direct traffic, someone has your link and they’re coming straight to your website, or whether or not it’s a referral from another website.
For example, maybe you’re service or product is regularly featured on a particular website. A lot of our traffic is going to come from there, and it’ll tell you that it’s a referral of traffic.
Now, how do you access and find that? The path is going to be Acquisition, Traffic, Source/Medium.
It’s really important to know where your traffic’s coming from, because if your traffic is coming from a referral, for example, a lot of traffic, well, you want to know that. Why is this site sending us a tremendous amount of traffic?
It’s just good information to have.
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Referrals
The next one on the list here is very similar.
Source/Medium is going to show you where your traffic’s coming from, but referrals. Similar path, Acquisition, Traffic, Referrals. That’s going to show you just the referral traffic.
Source/Medium is going to include direct traffic, your Google traffic, if you’re running Google ads, and then it’s going to show you the referrals, so that way you can see what percentage is coming from there.
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Channels
If you want to see high level or you can see direct versus organic versus referral versus social versus paid search versus email, well, then, Acquisition, All Traffic, Channels is going to show you that breakdown as well.
But referrals is going to show you just the websites that are sending you traffic. It’s not going to include your direct traffic or email or social or anything like that.
It can be a really good way to see who’s sending you traffic. You want to know where this traffic is coming from. For example, if you get a lot of traffic from one particular site, well, then, you can figure out ways to increase that. You want to double down on what’s working.
Or if you can see a certain traffic might not be that much, but it converts really well. Then you can go and figure out how to increase that, because the traffic that that website’s sending you is really well targeted and they’re buyers. That’s definitely a very valuable metric.
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Behaviour
How are they getting to your website?
Where are people landing, when they come to your website?
Are they coming straight to your home page?
Are they coming into another page?
This is really valuable information. It lets you know the entry points of how people are getting to your website, or where a lot of them are landing. For example, you’re going to want to go to Behavior, Site Content, All Pages, and then it’s going to give you all of the pages your top … Immediately, it’ll show you your top 10 entry place points on your website.
Nine times out of 10, if not 10 times out of 10, your main entry point’s going to be your home page. But beyond that, you want to see where are they landing.
What are they coming to your website for?
If you’ve got a blog and you’re producing a lot of blog content, you can see where a lot of times the blog content … What’s ranking
well, what people are coming to your site to read. You can actually produce more content around that type of topic to get people to come back to your website more consistently.
Your Analytics should be dictating the type of content that you’re producing. This pertains to what we’re talking about right now, because this will give you a good idea of what users are interested in that are coming to your website for.
If you keep getting this one blog post that consistently ranks really high as an entry point and it’s getting a lot of traffic, you’re probably going to want to write more blog posts around that specific type of topic because your audience is very interested in it.
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Location
We talked about referrals, where your traffic is coming from from the internet, but now we want to talk about where they’re coming from geographically, where they’re actually located physically.
This might not pertain to all businesses. If you have a local-only business you’re going to see that all your traffic is coming from your local area. But if you have an online business, where we have traffic from all over the world, people buying our product from all over the world, well, that’s very valuable data.
To find that, the path is Audience, Geo, Location.
Then you can see what countries you’re getting the most traffic from.
Then something that kind of goes along with that if you have an e-commerce website, what we highly recommend doing is make sure that you have a plug-in, a WordPress plug-in, that is able to send your e-commerce conversion data to Google Analytics, and then you have to enable that data within Google Analytics.
Basically, if you’re using WooCommerce, for example, WooCommerce has an official Google Analytics plug-in. You just plug it in, put in your Google Analytics UA code, and then it’ll start tracking your actual purchase data.
Then everything we just talked about becomes so much more valuable, because now you can see what countries you’re getting the most revenue from.
Then you can go and look at your referrals or your Source/Medium, and you can see if email is giving you the most revenue, or if it’s from Google organic, or if it’s from a certain website that’s referring a lot of traffic from you.
That is crucial for an e-commerce website to be able to see what’s working, and not just working from a traffic standpoint, but what’s working from a revenue standpoint.
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Mobile or desktop audience
This is hugely important. You can use your analytics to see what types of devices people are viewing your website on. The path for this is Audience, Mobile, Overview.
Now, it’s a mobile-first world. Everybody’s got one. Everything is moving to mobile, and you need to understand what your visitors are viewing your website on.
Mobile first doesn’t really apply to you if your audience is desktop first. But if your audience is mobile first, it’s going to let you know if you need to specifically focus on that, and you can get all of that information in Google Analytics.
It’s just insane the amount of information that is there, that you can dig in and optimise and just take your business to the next level.
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Don’t leave setting up Google Analytics till later
I didn’t know anything about Google Analytics in the beginning, but I knew it was important, so I made sure that I had the Google Analytics tracking pixel on my website, I had my UA code set, to where when I did understand it and I did have the bandwidth and time to come back and look at it, at least all of the data would be there for me, because it’s not retroactive. You can’t put it on two years after your website’s been built and online and expect to get that information two years down the road.
If you don’t use it, at least have it turned on and put in there so that when you do have the bandwidth or the time to go in and learn it, it’ll be there for you.
If you have any tips you can share on Google Analytics please write them in the comment section below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our email list below for more regular tips and strategies designed to help you run your business toward success.
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