Google Analytics is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful tools any digital marketer can have under their belt. Having already obtained a Google Analytics beginner course certificate in March, this week I decided to complete Google’s advanced course. I thought it would be useful to go over a few of the metrics I learned about and why they are useful metrics to track.
Average session duration
The average session duration is the average time users spend on your website. This can be useful for a few different reasons. For example, if I had a blog and noticed that the average session duration was less than two minutes then that might indicate that people aren’t sticking around my website to read my blog posts. Similarly, if I had a webpage that had videos on it, but I had a short average duration, that would tell me that my videos aren’t being watched.
Source and medium
These reports are helpful because they tell you where traffic to your website is coming from. The source report shows us whether or not users came to the page via direct link or by finding the page through a search engine like Google.
The medium report shows us how the users arrived at our website. This can include Organic Traffic (non-paid traffic from search engines), CPC/PPC (paid traffic from search engines), referral links, email, or even social media.
Bounce Rate
If a user comes to your webpage and then leaves immediately after visiting without having interacted with anything on the website, then this user would be considered a bounce. The bounce rate is a percentage of all the sessions that have bounced. Having a high bounce rate can be a sign of users being intimidated or even confused by your site.
Exit pages
I find this metric to be one of the most useful, as it tells you what pages users are leaving the website from the most. While the bounce rate tells you how many new users are leaving your website, it doesn’t tell you what pages they are leaving from. That’s when the exit pages metric comes in. By looking at the exit page metric, you can easily find what pages are causing the most problems, and then you can modify the page accordingly.
Devices
This metric is important to track because it shows you how many users are using either a desktop, mobile, or tablet. This is helpful information because it can help you decide what device you need to focus your efforts on. If you find that more people are visiting your page on a desktop, then you might want to focus on optimizing the desktop experience.
Final thoughts
After this week of learning Google Analytics, I would say it’s definitely one of the most useful tools I’ve come across. While the metrics I listed are some of the most important to track, they definitely aren’t the only ones to track. Google Analytics has so much to offer it and takes some time to learn, but with a little bit of time and devotion, anyone can learn how to use it. I believe every one with a website or even social media page should be tracking their metrics and getting a better understanding of their audiences and where they come from.