Tracking Google Analytics Results

In previous posts I have talked about why analytics is important and how to use it, but it is extremely important to know how to track the results you receive. On Google you can find many articles to help you get started with tracking your website results. In class I read an article titled, "The Six Most Important Web Metrics to Track for Your Business Website" and I found it to be particularly helpful.

To get started, there are a few areas that you should focus on.

1) Visitors: It is always helpful to know how many people are visiting your website, but it is also helpful to know how many of those visitors are new, and how many are returning. To check this, you can simply look at the pie chart on the top right side of the page.

2) Referrals: Let's say your website has 9,000 new visitors. That's obviously great, but take that information and break it down even further. Find out where those new visitors are coming from. Are they from the Facebook Ad campaign you created, or are they from a website who you are cross linking? Once you find out where the traffic is coming from, you can use the information to make changes and attract even more visitors.


3)Bounce Rate: Okay, so now you know how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from. Now it's time to take it to the next step, which is finding the bounce rate. If you are not familiar with what a bounce rate is, it is simply the percentage of single page visits. The point of knowing your bounce rate is that you want people to visit more than one page! You do not want visitors to just click and leave. So, if you know the bounce rate you can make changes to your content to get them to stay and click around some more.

4)Exit Pages: The bounce rate and exit pages might seem like they mean the same thing, but they don't. Exit pages are the pages that were last in the session. To check the percentage of exits go to <Behavior <Site Content <Exit Pages.

5)Conversion Rate: This is simply taking the number of conversion and dividing that number by the total ad clicks during the same time period. The higher the conversion rate the better!

6)Top 10 Pages: Knowing which pages on your website people like the best is crucial when making changes to your content. For instance, if you see a high exit rate when people go to you About Us page, but a low exit rate when people go another page, you know that you should make some changes to the About Us page.

At first Google Analytics might seem like an overload of information that is hard to understand, but it is actually very helpful and simple. You just find a place to get started, and following these steps are a great place to start!