Your Website Behaves In a Manner - Understanding Google Analytics

If there are no free lunches in this world, then there sure are God sent tools to help your business get just the right perspectives. As a Small and Medium enterprise, one of the basic most things which a business does to set its online presence is to have a website!

I have a website! But do you understand it enough?
Its important to understand your first step to being online, which is your website, very closely. One skill recommended to business owners who have a website is to have a solid understanding of their site analytics. Many people treat their website as something they need to have “just because.” If you build a site for services you offer or products you sell, what people see and how they interact is directly related to how much money your site rakes in for you.

To start with an overview, what if you know, the most popular pages on your website, who is coming to your website and from where, for how long are people staying on which page of your website, which keywords are people searching for and landing onto your website, are you getting relevant traffic or not, what if you get to know which pages do you need to change in terms of design! Google analytics enables you to do just that and a lot more.

Site Usage Overview: Dashboard

Visits

A visit simply put, is, one person who views one or more pages on the site. If the same person comes back, that’s two visits.

More visits to a site equates to more “traffic” and more people in general seeing the site. Logically you will want this number to improve and be in the positive everytime and increase with time.

Pageviews

Pageviews are the number of pages on your site that were viewed. Generally, each link you click takes you to a new page. If, in one month, 1,000 people went to the homepage, clicked on an article and then landed somewhere on your website, that month would have 2,000 page views.

Since pageviews signifies that more and more of content is being seen on your website, you will wnt this number to increase with time, like visits. pageviews can increase in two ways: more visitors could be coming to the site or visitors could be viewing more pages per visit.

Pages/visit

Dividing total page views by total visits gives the average number of pages that are viewed per visit.

An increasing pages/visit number shows that visitors are clicking on more pages on the site per visit. This is a crucial metric as it helps the site owner understand that more and more of content is being seen on the website.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of people who see one page and leave the site (essentially “bouncing” off of a page). Visitors who bounce have a page/visit number of 1. Bounce rate should generally be lower and you must look at maintaining the content on your website strongly and make it engaging enough, such that the user on your website feels compelled enough to stay on.

A decreasing bounce rate is always a good thing. A decreasing bounce rate means that people found what they wanted and more. Bounce rate is affected by the same things that the pages/visit number is: site design, engagement levels of the content, site UI.

Average time on site

This number is the average amount of time that each visit lasts. This figure is tough to report accurately by any of the analytics programs.

An increasing time, however, could be an indication of reader engagement and attention span. 

% New Visits

This is the percentage of the total visits that came from new visitors. A new visitor is simply someone without our site’s cookie present in their browser. As such, this figure has a fairly high margin of error.

Know your customer: Sources of Traffic

Traffic sources can basically be of three kinds:

• direct traffic (people who type our URL in their browser or use a browser-based bookmark)
• referring sites (a link to our site from another site)
• search engines.

There’s no right or wrong distribution of traffic sources but a healthy strategy will typically keep each piece close to a third. Though it depends upon your business domain, the content available on the internet, search trends of prospective customers etc, these factors help form the right strategic direction for a healthy mix of traffic sources. 

Keeping a strong tab on your Traffic sources can surely help you realize the need for SEO, Optimizing content etc.

Content Overview: Understanding your website content

Content is the most critical aspect/ feature of your product called "website" after the UI and design. Website content is not something which is written once and forgotten forever. Infact it must be evolved overtime and changed dynamically according to the consumer insight you have. According to what you think is your prospective target audience searching you by/ with.

Ensure that content is fairly strongly placed, as that is the key to not only keeping your target audience engaged but to actually get them to reach your website in the first place.

How do we access Google Analytics/ Teach me the initiation of how to integrate it with my website?

Its fairly simple, and its FREE!! If you do not already have a Google analytics account running, create one on: www.google.com/analytics. once you are through create a new account!

Once you are through, Google will give you a GA code, which you will need to enter into the footer of your website in all pages. It will be far easier if you have a CMS (content management system) supporting your site at the back-end.

We hope this information helps our SMEs to further take charge of their online presence and reach to the next level. For more information and support, drop in a comment to this post and our team of expert will get help you truly emerge!!