Your small business website is a key component in your marketing strategy. So ensuring it’s driving customers to your company is vital to your small business’ success.
But how do you measure your site’s effectiveness?
The answer is Google Analytics.
Once installed, Google Analytics gives you the ability to see how your site is performing and understand how your customers interact with it. Yet understanding the metrics of this valuable tool can be a challenge if you’re not a Google Analytics guru. To help you make sense of it all, we’re giving you the scoop on some key Google Analytics metrics, and why they’re important in gauging your site’s performance.
The Basic Metrics
Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are the number of people who visit your site. This number is important because is shows exactly how much traffic your site is getting during a specified timeframe — whether it’s a day, week or month.
Visits – This is the number of individual sessions a visitor initiates on your website within 30 minutes. If a visitor is inactive for 30 minutes on your site or leaves and returns more than 30 minutes later, it is considered a new visit.
Page Views – This metric shows the page(s) on your site that a person looks at during a visit.
Page Views/Visit – Page views/visit is a calculated engagement metric that shows how many pages a person views during each visit.
Bounce Rate – One of the most helpful metrics for gauging your site’s success is your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors that only go to one page on your site and then leave.
Average Time On Site –This is fairly straightforward metric; it’s the average time a visitor spends on your site. The average person only reads about a quarter of a site page before moving on, so keep your content concise and engaging.
Analyzing Google Analytics Metrics
There are a few options for viewing your site metrics on Google Analytics. Depending on your preference, any of these options will provide you with a view of the metrics you need to gauge the effectiveness of your site.
1. When you are in your account, click on “All Website Data” and you will see your Audience Report for the previous 30 days.
2. In the far right corner of your account landing page, you will see a date range. Click on the dates to get a drop-down that allows you to adjust the calendar.
3. Just below the date range drop-down, you also have the option to look at your data by hour, day, week and month.
If you need assistance understanding your site’s Google Analytics, or someone to do the number crunching for you, Mischa Communications can help! Contact us to maximize the effectiveness of your small business website!