Whether you’re a beginner in web design, blogging, or data measurement, you’re probably aware of Google Analytics. Put Simply, Google Analytics (AKA Analytics, which we will call it from now on), is an important tool used by webmasters, that measures various statistics of a website. These statistics include unique visits, page views, and your most viewed content. You can learn a lot about your website, the visitors and its performance by viewing the Analytics report.
One drawback of Analytics that many people state is that it sometimes takes long to track valuable data. You might have even shied away from using Analytics regularly due to the amount of time it takes to extract and process information you’re interested in.
Time won’t be a problem once you’ve read this article. The aim is to have you extract and analyze all your essential statistics within 5 minutes flat. Imagine what else you can do with the time saved, because if you’re anything like me, it’ll give you time to go grab that nice coffee before that crucial meeting you have to attend.
The Important Data
You will want to pull the most important data once you have logged into Analytics, so you can find the most important information in the quickest possible time. Here is a quick overview of the most important data you’ll come across in your Analytics report:
Visits:
Once the summary sheet appears, you’ll immediately be able to view the website visit statistics, but it’s likely you’ll want to view this in more detail. To achieve this, click on the option that says “View Report”, then click the “Visits” link below the Site Usage section. This will show you how many visits your site gets on a daily basis and even the percentage of the visitors on any particular day.
Page Views:
The page view count that your site gets is different to the visit count. Page views are how many pages your visitors view on your site. To find out how many pages are viewed per visitor, you can divide the figures. Lets take an example. Imagine your site gets 10,000 page views per month, with 5,000 unique visitors, and then on average, it’s safe to say that each visitor accesses two pages. To view your Page views data, simply click on the “Page Views” option on the left sidebar.
Visitor Loyalty:
It certainly is valuable knowing the stats for unique visitors and page views, but it won’t count for anything if you don’t know the “Visitor Loyalty”. This simply shows you how many times a particular visitor comes back to your site. It’s broken down to the number of visits and not users within the Analytics tool. This information will allow you to see the amount of people visit your site and how your site community is developing. A very handy statistic.
Top Content:
Your “Top Content” is the last of your must know data from the Web Analytics. When you obtain this valuable data, you will start to see themes and trends in what sort of content your community likes, so you can tailor more specific and interesting information your audience will love and appreciate. Navigate to the “Content” heading in the menu bar, and click on “Top Content” to see this data in more detail. Looking at the screen shot below, you can see that the top content for WorkHorse WebPages is predominantly on SEO Services and Search Engine Marketing. This is the niche we were tackling when we first set the website up and it only confirms what we were doing was correct.
Other Measurable Data
The information covered so far is a good point to start for you and your site, to obtain some crucial information. But this isn’t the only data available to you. There are other measurable that are also important, which will allow you to see the behaviour of your browsers and audience.
The following are some other important measurable:
Bounce Rate: This measures the amount of people (in %) who leave/bounce from your site after viewing just one article. So within the content section of Analytics, this shows how many people leave your site in percentage terms, after viewing one article. The aim is to have the lowest possible bounce rate.
Average Time on Site or Page: Even though this may not seem valuable, it’s certainly useful. You can test your content yourself, by viewing the amount of time the average visitor views a particular article, as shown by analytics against you reading the content aloud and timing yourself. E.g. If it took you 5 minutes to read an article, but the report shows 2 minutes by the average visitor, then something must be wrong. You can then start investigating as to why people leave the article early.
Traffic Sources Overview: How and where your visitors come from is as important as what your visitors do while they are browsing your site. Analytics can show you exactly where your visitors came from. Looking at the Traffic Sources Overview section (Available in the menu bar under “Traffic Sources”), you will be able to see if your visitors arrive by the search engines, direct URL or referring sites. Once you’re aware of this information, you can then start to focus on marketing campaigns more tailored to where your visitors come from.
There are many other metrics within Analytics, but this information is crucial and you can obtain it all within 5 minutes. Analytics should be an important part of any online presence as the information available is invaluable. We suggest creating a free Google Analytics account if you haven’t already done so and start tracking some of the key factors relating to your site and see if you can see any themes or trends appearing.
