If you have a website but you aren’t checking your performance, you’re wasting your time and resources. Being able to measure how well your site is doing is crucial to the success of your online brand. If your website gets a lot of visits, but no leads, then there may be a problem with the design or copy on your site.
Thankfully, Google Analytics can tell you everything you need to know about your site’s popularity. Performance is more than just the total number of website visitors; there are many other factors that influence the health of your website.
If you don’t know how to get Google Analytics installed on your site, Google provides an easy-to-understand guide to getting started.
Google Analytics is an incredibly comprehensive tool, so we’ll only be going through the basics here. With this information, you should be able to have a general idea of how well your site is doing.
Sessions
This is the total number of visitors to your website. If a person comes to your site and visits one or two pages before leaving, this is counted as one “session.” If the same person leaves your site and comes back later, this is counted as two sessions.
Why you should care
Having a high number of sessions means your site is popular! However, keep in mind that some of these visits will be duplicates (the same person viewing the site repeatedly).
Users
A user is someone who has had at least one session in the given time frame. This shows the total number of unique users that are visiting your site (no duplicates).
Why you should care
Every person who visits your site is a potential lead. A high number of sessions but a low number of users means your site is incredibly popular with a small audience. If your sessions and users are about the same, it means that your visitors rarely come back for a second visit.
Pageviews And Average Pages Per Session
A pageview is the total number of times any of your pages have been visited. A single user browsing through five pages will increase your pageviews by five. If you divide the number of pageviews by the total number of sessions, you get Average Pages per Session.
Why you should care
A high pageview count and average pages per session means that people are actually reading through your site.
Average Session Duration
Similar to average pages per session, this metric can help you keep track of how engaged people are with your content. If you get a thousand website visits but everyone leaves after five seconds, then you know you need to change the design or copy on your pages.
Why you should care
The longer someone spends on your site, the more interested they are in what you have to say (generally speaking). The higher this metric is, the smoother your sales funnel.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site without visiting any other pages. If your bounce rate is particularly high, you should make sure there are always links on your articles leading to other articles or contact pages. Not everyone will click on them, but you want to make it easy for people to go through all your pages.
Why you should care
Ultimately, the goal of having a website is to get new customers or inform users about what you have to offer. The lower your bounce rate, the likelier people will be interested in your product or service.
With this, you should have a basic understanding of how well your website is doing. However, this is only scratching the surface of what you can understand from Google Analytics. If you’re interested in diving deeper or need some help setting it up for your own website, contact us at Curve Communications here.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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