Introduction to Analytics

Measuring and tracking how users are interacting with your website is often overlooked by webmasters, but is one of the most important factors in achieving website success.

Proper tracking and review helps you learn more about who’s visiting your site and what they are doing while they are there.

Armed with this information you can then adjust things on your site that may not be working or could work better. Often simple changes like the color or placement of a call to action button can significantly impact returns in terms of conversion.

The video to the right serves as an introduction to Google Analytics and will help you get started with this invaluable tool.

Key Things To Pay Attention To In Google Analytics

Now that you have a good overview of how the interface works, here are a few key stats we recommend keeping an eye on in Google Analytics:

1. Sessions

The number of times a computer or device opens your site in their browser. Visits are tracked by cookies and are important because they can give you insight into customer loyalty.

2. Unique Visitors

The number of unique site visitors for the time frame you selected in your dashboard. If I visit your site 20 times in one week and you view that week in analytics it will show me as 1 unique visitor. Unique visitors give you important information on how many new people are visiting your site from your marketing efforts.

3. Bounce Rate

Occurs when a website visitor only views a single page on a website and then leaves a site without visiting any other pages. High bounce rates can indicate a problem with the page or that the visitor is not finding the information they thought they would. High bounce rates can be an indication of low hanging fruit to the savvy marketer. You’ve done the work to get them to the page, now by lowering your bounce rate you can often see your conversions (sales) go up.

4. Pageviews

Defined as visitor views of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a visitor clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional page view. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second page view is recorded as well.

5. Unique Page Views

Recorded in the Content Overview report; aggregate page views that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique page view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times. Page views are a great indication of user engagement with your site. A related metric to the page view is time on site.

6. Referring Source

Tells you how people are finding your site. It can show you other sites that are linking to you, keywords from Google searches and more. Referring sources can also help calculate return on investment if your paying for advertising on other websites.

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