“What gets measured, gets managed,” is a famous quote, meaning if you want to improve something, keep an eye on the metrics, so you know exactly how successful your efforts are. When you know precisely what’s working and what’s not, you can keep adjusting and tweaking to grow your business faster. The beauty of online marketing is how many useful measurement figures you’re provided by Google Analytics. Let’s take a look at the eight most important stats to track.
1. Know Your Traffic
When it comes to website success, the first figure that leaps to mind is usually traffic: the number of visitors your website receives each day. This is the figure that new website owners leap out of bed to check in the mornings. And understandably so. When you first see the traffic rolling in, it really is rather exciting.
It’s important to divide traffic into two figures and track both. You have “users,” which is the number of unique individuals visiting your site. And then, you have “sessions,” which is the total number of visits, including individuals who have returned to your website more than once during the day, week, month, or whatever time period you’re looking at.
More Sessions = Better Content
Why does the distinction between sessions and users matter? Well, suppose you had a very high number of sessions and a comparatively low number of unique users. This indicates that a certain group of people love your content and keep coming back for more, which could be perfect for your particular offering. Or, it might not be good for you, and thus it signals you want to focus more on reaching new people.
More Users = Better Rankings
If you have more unique users than sessions, on the other hand, then perhaps your organic or paid rankings in Google are doing great, but your content isn’t quite good enough to warrant a second visit. In this case, you might like to build up the quality of your content until you see your sessions rise alongside your users.
2. Conversions to Paying Customers
As more experienced business owners know, traffic is for the show, and conversions are for pros. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if those visitors aren’t taking out their credit cards, that traffic is pretty much worthless.
Your Google dashboard makes it easy to set up conversion goals. Then you can see what percentage of your visitors are hitting those goals and earning you revenue. A goal can be purchasing a product or service. It might also be signing up for your newsletter, downloading a piece of content, requesting a quote, or anything other action you want them to take.
3. Track Traffic Sources
It’s also super-important to know exactly where you’re traffic’s coming from. There are four overall sources of website traffic: organic search engine traffic, paid advertising traffic, referral links from other websites, and people typing your website URL directly into the browser (these are often individuals who found your site offline, perhaps at a conference, or on a business card or leaflet).
You can also see very detailed traffic source info, such as the exact keyword someone Googled when they came across your site. You can even see the visitor’s age, sex, geographical location, and more besides.
The Power of Analyzing Traffic Sources
This information can give you amazing insights into who your most profitable visitors and customers are. To illustrate, imagine your total conversion rate of visitors to paying customers is two percent, but you notice that visitors coming from one particular traffic source convert ten percent of the time.
You can then focus most of your online marketing energy on that particular traffic source, which might be a kind of Google search phrase, a hobby group you’ve targeted for advertising, people in one particular state, city, neighborhood, or anything else. As you focus on this more lucrative group and move away from less profitable sources, you can expect your average conversions to skyrocket.
4. See Who’s Bouncing
Another key indicator of the quality of your content is the bounce rate. This measures the percentage of visitors who arrive on your site, look at just one page, and then “bounce” (leave the site). Naturally, you want people to enjoy the content so much that they click on other pages and explore your website further rather than immediately leaving—so the lower the bounce rate, the better.
Google’s algorithm uses the bounce rate, among myriad other metrics, to judge the quality of your content. So it’s wise to find ways to entice your visitors to stay, click, and browse. This will bolster your search engine rankings.
5. Pages Viewed per Visit
Not only do you want your visitors to browse, but you also want them to visit as many pages as possible. The average number of pages visited per session is another key indicator of quality in Google’s eyes. You can encourage visitors to stay and click with plenty of links to related content, in-depth clusters of connected topics, links to offer pages, strong calls to action, and overall top-notch content quality.
6. How Long Are They Hanging Around?
Also, keep an eye on the average session duration. When the quality’s high, visitors will usually stay for longer. So ensure your content is giving the visitor exactly what they’re looking for, and more besides.
If you notice that, for some pages, people are leaving quickly, study your competition for those keywords. Then see if you can improve the content on those specific pages, outdoing your competitors. As a result, your visitors will stay for longer, and Google will notice. You’ll be rewarded with higher rankings, traffic, and conversions.
7. Social Media Referrals
In today’s ever-connected world of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and TikTok, social media is often a wonderful source of traffic and leads for business owners. The network referrals figure in your Google Analytics dashboard will help keep your finger on the pulse of your social media activities.
You can see which platforms and posts are sending you traffic and also the value of that traffic. Once again, this will inform your marketing strategy, teaching you where your social media budget is best spent and where it’s being wasted.
8. Mobile vs Desktop Traffic
Many business owners make the mistake of designing their websites purely for desktop browsers. But in fact, over 60 percent of website traffic now comes from mobile devices. And this trend is only growing. Websites optimized only for desktop computers often look bad on mobile screens and are difficult to navigate.
When you know the kinds of devices your audience is using, you can adjust your website to deliver the best browsing experience possible. Mobile-friendly sites are responsive in design, adapting to small mobile screens with less complexity, larger fonts, and various other ease-of-use factors. Of course, you might find that your visitors don’t use mobiles much. It all depends on the industry.
Contact LovelyPixels today for a comprehensive marketing solution to boost your traffic, leads, and long-term revenue. We dive deep into your industry to learn what makes your customers tick and have them looking to you for solutions, whatever your product or service might be.
