Everything you ever wanted to know about your website is waiting for you in Google Analytics. Want to know how much traffic your website’s getting? Want to know what your users are doing on your website? Want to know where your users are located geographically? Want to know how many users get to your website from a mobile device?
Those are just a few examples of website metrics you can view in Google Analytics. There are thousands of additional metrics but for the purpose of this article, we will focus on the most important ones that all businesses should be tracking and how they can help you achieve business objectives.
5 Reasons to use Google Analytics PLUS what to track
- How many people are visiting your website: This is the most basic metric that every website owner should know. After all, it tells you if people are actually interested enough in your business to visit your website. There are two things to measure: Pageviews and Unique Pageviews. Pageviews measures the total number of webpages that were viewed for a given time. Unique Pageviews measures the number of webpages viewed by unique users. For example, a user may visit the same webpage on two different different occasions. Unique Pageviews would only count the first visit, not subsequent visits.
- How much time did users spend on your website: This is a great metric but it is often overlooked by business owners. Google Analytics will show you the average amount of time users spent on each webpage. It’s a good sign to have a high average time on page as this indicates users are actually reading what they see. If you have a low average time on page, this could indicate bad content that is not interesting to users. In the example below, we show an average time of 5 minutes and 24 seconds on our homepage. However, if we look below the 5:24 metric, we see other webpages that have a minute or less. It’s a good idea to review these pages to ascertain why the average time on page was low.
- How users are navigating your website: Did you ever want to look over your users’ shoulders to watch them click from page to page on your website? Well now you can using Behavior Flow. This feature will give you visual representation (see below) of the flow of traffic through your website, including how users get from page A to page B.
- How many of your website visitors are using mobile devices: It’s important to understand how users see your website and how they interact with it. If visitors are using mobile devices yet your website isn’t mobile-friendly, they will likely have a negative experience. Understanding the volume of your mobile traffic can guide the future direction of your website, including the growing importance of responsive and mobile-friendly websites.
- Which search terms people are entering to find you: Many companies put a lot of effort into better search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers spend a lot of time researching keywords to try to drive more traffic to their website. With Google Analytics, you can actually see what people are typing in the search engine to locate you. In the example below, we can see that “iphone repair Indianapolis” is what most users are searching for when the ultimately end up on our website. With that information, we can further improve our SEO for the popular searches as well as the less popular searches.
Those are just five reasons why you should use Google Analytics for your website. Once you log in, you’ll see that Google Analytics offers a ton of other metrics as well that can help you improve your website as well as your business.