Google Analytics Insights: 9 Metrics You Need To Understand

Generating leads online requires sharing great content and a thorough grasp of what your audience likes to see. You might have a great website set up, but if you don’t recognize the origin of your traffic and the reaction of visitors to web content, then your marketing efforts might go to waste. One way to discover if your website is delivering promising results for your business is by accessing Google Analytics. It allows small business owners to learn more about their website’s performance and evaluate the effectiveness of their digital marketing practices. 

In this post, we’ll break down 9 Google Analytics metrics that you need to be tracking. Don’t worry about the technicalities of these insights as they’re relatively simple, and once you’ve got a better understanding of the components, you’ll be able to help your business thrive. 

Traffic 

Google Analytics Insights

Have you ever wondered how much traffic your website receives over a certain period? To answer this question accurately, you need to have Google Analytics in your digital tool belt. It provides valuable data that can be converted to actionable insights for the benefit of your online business. 

Analyzing the website traffic can help business owners understand if their marketing efforts influence the users visiting their site. It’s also important to recognize if you’re attracting the right traffic to your website, and it fits your targeted audience. If not, then you need to make changes to your website, so it attracts the right audience. This will act as an excellent starting point for your business website venture. 

Average Time Spent 

Google Analytics Metrics

Google Analytics is an essential tool in every online business owner’s arsenal. Not only does it demonstrates the volume and location of your traffic, but also the amount of time a user spends on your website. Paying attention to this metric can help companies evaluate the performance of their business. Therefore, if they see a low value, then it means the website’s design and content strategy must be upgraded to retain customer engagement. 

Traffic Sources

Traffic source Insights Google Analytics

The traffic sources metric provides information on where your traffic is coming from, whether it’s organic search, direct URL search, social media, or any other channel. It shows the precise source of the traffic arriving at your site. Businesses implement different kinds of advertising and digital marketing services to promote their brand and generate new leads. With Google, Analytics entrepreneurs can learn about the performance of their campaigns. Traffic sources metric provides a comprehensive table of all the sources of traffic and their activity on the website, allowing quick analysis. 

Bounce Rate

In simple terms, the bounce rate represents the percentage or number of users that leave your website after viewing a single page. A low bounce rate – under 50% – indicates that your website is well-received, and users find your content relevant and useful. On the other hand, a high bounce rate shows poor user experience and that the website fails to cater to the audience’s interests. The acceptable bounce rate threshold differs for each type of website; however, if you are falling behind the industry standard, then it’s time to make some changes. 

User Behavior Flow

The Behavior Flow feature allows you to follow the journey of the visitors once they arrive at your website. It displays how users navigate through the site, the pages they view, where they spent the most time, and the pages they exit from. To sum it up, the behavior flow data offers insights into how visitors interact with your website and their usage patterns. 

Exit Pages

Exit Pages demonstrates the web pages your visitors see last before they leave the site. This also includes the most common page that causes your traffic to leave. It could be the checkout page, a specific product page, or the services page. Once you start noticing a pattern, then it’s best to upgrade the content on those pages to retain customer attention. Analyzing the highest exit pages can help companies ensure that their website is optimized and giving every user a reason to stay. 

Location 

Setting up a business website gives entrepreneurs the chance to cater to a broader audience virtually. This is where Google Analytics comes in handy. It allows businesses to monitor where the traffic is coming from and the location of your visitors. This way, companies can create location-based targeted campaigns for increased ROI.  

Mobile vs. Desktop 

Over 50% of today’s web traffic comes from mobile users. This intensifies the need for enhanced mobile-optimized websites, so mobile users can enjoy browsing the site quickly on whatever screen they’re on. However, this is subjective to change depending on the type of website you’re operating. Google Analytics gives you a summary of what devices the site visitors are on, which provides insight into what web design the business should focus on. Learning the mobile to desktop ratio during the early days can help you adopt a mobile-first approach if the majority of your audience is mobile users, which in turn, boosts your website’s ranking and online visibility. 

New vs. Returning Users

It’s a proven fact that 80% percent of your business comes from only 20% of the consumers, and the majority of those sales come from returning customers. Your returning customers are the fuel of your operation, and are much easier to maintain in comparison to converting new customers. Google analytics marks any user that has visited your website within the past two years via the same device as a Returning Visitor. If they surpass the two years expiration date, then they will be marked as a New Visitor. You can find this metric by visiting your Google Analytics dashboard, selecting the ‘Audience’ option, then clicking on the ‘Behavior’ option to open the drop-down list, and selecting ‘New vs. Returning.’ In doing so, business owners can keep an eye out for all the website visitors, and how many of them return to your website frequently. 

Wrapping Up 

Google Analytics is incredibly data-rich and the ultimate addition to your digital tool kit, as long as you know how to interpret it. It has given business owners the opportunity to grasp informative insights into consumer behavior and leverage them to improve their marketing campaigns. While this doesn’t cover the entirety of the Google Analytics tools, it’s a great place to get you started. Utilize these metrics to enhance your practices. Mark our words; your site will thank you for it. 

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