The more you know about your website visitors, the better. You only know whether your website is successful and whether it helps you grow your business if you can get quantitative measures of who your audience is, what pages they’re visiting, and how long they’re staying. Lets explore The 9 Best Google Analytics Metrics to Track for Your Website.
The 9 Best Google Analytics Metrics to Track for Your Website
- Total Sessions
- Average Session Duration
- Pages per Session
- Bounce Rate
- Exit Pages
- Audience Demographics
- New Visitor Conversions
- Return Visitor Conversions
- Traffic Sources
To help you improve your efforts in this arena, here are the 9 best Google Analytics Metrics to track for your online presence.
The 9 Best Google Analytics Metrics to Track for Your Website
1. Total Sessions
This surface metric gives you a great overview of how many total visitors your page gets. Be sure to distinguish between total sessions and unique sessions; a user visiting your website will be counted twice in the former, but only once in the latter. Tracking total sessions gives you a good idea of your website’s total exposure, while unique sessions showcase its true reach.
2. Average Session Duration
The longer your visitors stay on your website, the more chances you have to convince them of your brand’s core value proposition. Tracking your average session duration over time helps you determine the success of your web content. Always look to lengthen it for greater conversion rates and more long term success.
3. Pages per Session
Similar to session duration, tracking the amount of pages an average visitor frequents while on your page gives you an idea about their interest level. Again, a higher rate will be indicative of good content that keeps your audience on your website for longer (increasing their chances to convert)
4. Bounce Rate
Visitors who leave your website after only a single page are called ‘bounces’. Regardless of how successful your website is, a portion of your audience will always fall into this category. In fact, any bounce rate under 50% should be considered good. But if it gets higher, start examining why. Slow load times, irrelevant landing pages, and low-quality content can all be reasons your audience bounces from your site at a high rate.
5. Exit Pages
An exit page is the section of your website from which your audience leaves. Examining which pages fall into this category most frequently can help you optimize your online presence for conversions. For example, visitors leaving your website after buying your product is a desirable outcome–unlike your home page being your biggest exit page.
6. Audience Demographics
The audience section within Google Analytics can be crucially beneficial to help you determine and optimize your target audience. Here, you can see whether your website and marketing efforts are actually attracting the right audience, what devices are most frequently used to view your content, and more. You can then use that information to optimize your online presence more closely for your audience.
7. New Visitor Conversions
Rather than tracking your conversions in one metrics, split up your new visitor conversions from your return visitors. Now, you can determine exactly when, and how frequently, users who visit your website for the first time convert.
8. Return Visitor Conversions
Return visitors probably came back to your website for a reason. But if they didn’t convert, why not, and what can you do to convert them this time around? That’s what tracking this metric will help you answer.
9. Traffic Sources
Finally, pay special attention to the sources from which your audience visits your website. Especially if you’re running campaigns on social media and search, you want to know exactly how those campaigns are performing. Tracking your sources allows you to determine exactly how visitors got to your website, and how they behave once they get there.
Combined, these 9 variables are the best Google Analytics metrics to track for your website. The more specific you get, the more accurately you can determine the success of your website and marketing efforts. For help in building a website designed to succeed in these metrics, and to learn how exactly you can track them, contact us.
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