23 Sep Sifting Through Your Analytics

You’re staring at your Google Analytics – sessions, bounce rates, acquisitions, pageviews – what do they mean? Whichones will give you the feedback you actually need for your website?

Website analytics can give you a lot of information for growing and improving your website, if you know what numbers to pay attention to.

The first thing you’ll see on your analytics page is the numbers for users, sessions, and pageviews. Elembee.com explains that a user is one unique person visiting your, where a session includes any interactions that person has with your site from the time they open it to the time they close it. A pageview is any unique page that person views. So a person who visits your home page on Monday and your “About” and “Contact” page on Tuesday would be counted as one unique visitor with two sessions and three pageviews.

Tracking your users will help you trend the amount of unique visitors finding and visiting your website. You want that number grow each month to know that new people are continually seeing your content.

The bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit one page of your site and then leave. This doesn’t always mean you’re losing visitors – it could mean someone clicked over to a single blog post from one of your social media sites, read it and left. Or it could mean someone opened your website along with several other tabs and stayed idle for more than 30 minutes, which is also counted as a bounce.

Additional Sections

Google offers a TON of information, but there are a few sections that are really helpful to keep an eye on. Under the Audience section, you can check “location” to see where people come from. Demographics tell you imperative information on age, gender and even interests so you can know your audience better.

Check the “mobile” section to see how many people are visiting your site using their phone or tablet. These numbers reinforce how important it is to have a responsive website design that translates to all devices.

Behavior tells you which pages of your website are the most visited – it’s good to know what content is the most popular so you can create similar information moving forward.

Finally, acquisition tells you how visitors are finding your site: which other websites and social media channels refer the most traffic.

Which analytics are most important to you? Share by commenting below!