Helping You Navigate Through Google Analytics

Almost every website launched today has (or should have) Google Analytics installed. If your website doesn’t have Google Analytics installed – contact your web company today and ask them to add it.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that offers detailed visitor statistics. Google Analytics can be used to track normal site activities like number of site visits, page views, average time spent on your website and a whole lot more.

Unfortunately, many Google Analytics users don’t quite understand what they’re looking at when they login, click on “View Report” and land on the overwhelming “Dashboard” page full of graphs and charts.

A few common measurements that you can get from Google Analytics are:

• Visits – This is a summary of your site usage. You can review the number of site visits within a given a timeframe.
• Pageviews – This is the number of web pages visited on your site within a given timeframe.
• Pages/Visit – This is the average number of web pages one user visits while surfing your website.
• Bounce Rate – Represents the percentage of visitors who enter your site and leave before viewing any of the other web pages on your site. Strive for a bounce rate below 35%. 
• New Visits – Represents the percentage of new visitors to your website within a given time frame. New visits are key if you’re looking to increase brand awareness.
• Direct Traffic – Is the percentage of traffic coming to your site by typing your exact URL into the search bar. Example www.echidna.ca.
• Referring Sites – Is the percentage of traffic coming to your site through other sites like Google paid for ads, Facebook or related organizations who may link to your website.
• Search Engines – Is the percentage of traffic coming to your website through Google, Yahoo or another common search engine.
• Keywords – under traffic sources you can view the most frequently used keywords that users are typing in search engines to find your website. This information is crucial to view prior to setting up a PPC ad campaign.

It’s important to note that we’re just cracking the surface here. Google Analytics offers a TON of other useful tools and stats about your website. In future blogs we’ll dive a bit deeper into these tools, but for now, log into your Google Analytics account and see if you can find and understand the stats listed above.