10 Important Google Analytics Metrics You Should Follow

Small businesses must analyze and transform information collated from their websites into insightful data. This transformed data helps website owners make sense of all things concerning digital marketing and make informed decisions. Google Analytics is a service tool that enables small business owners to track their business websites’ progress.

To the clueless business owner, the concept of Google Analytics and the metrics involved may seem like a tough concept to grasp.

However, in this article, you will find that all concepts about Google Analytics metrics have been broken down in easy to understand language to help you grasp the importance of each metric.

What is Google Analytics?

As promised earlier, I will break down the basics of Google analytics in a way that will be easy for you to understand. Google Analytics is a free software used to analyze digital resources gathered on visitors that visit your site. The components of Google Analytics help track traffic to your website and provide invaluable insight into your target customers’ actions.

These insights help business owners make informed decisions concerning their business. Before I explain the details of the metrics used in Google Analytics, let me explain the importance of Google Analytics for your business.

Here we have mentioned a few resources which will help you to learn more about Google Analytics:

• Meet the next generation of Google Analytics: Google Analytics 4
• Set up Analytics for a website and/or app (GA4)
• Set up Analytics for a website (Universal Analytics)
• Upgrade to a Google Analytics 4 property
• Universal Analytics versus Google Analytics 4 data

Importance of Google Analytics

The importance of Google analytics for businesses, irrespective of their size, cannot be overstated. I have listed some of its importance below.

• It helps you collate and analyze website data
• Helps simplify decision making
• Google Analytics helps you to provide insights on how to facilitate business growth
• Helps you improve websites engagement
• Reduces bounce rates and improves conversion.

What Are Google Analytics Metrics?

When you are running a business website, regardless of the size (big or small), the website’s end goal is to attract as many people as possible. Some of the visitors to the site may end up becoming your customers, while others may browse through products on your site and leave without conversion.

Everyone who visits your website can convert from a visitor of the site to a potential customer. There are several ways you can increase the conversion of these website visitors using Google Analytics metrics.

What Are Some Important Google Analytics Metrics?

Some Google analytics metrics you should understand as a business owner are:

1. New Visitor Conversion

Many businesses get visitors on their websites every day without even realizing or identifying these visitors. Google Analytics makes it possible for businesses to identify first-time visitors to your website and returning visitors. Since both visitors are different, it is expected that their conversion would be handled separately.

The first step to get a new visitor to convert and return to your site later is to employ mobile-friendly designs. These designs help boost user experience. It would help if you identify what catches the attention of a first-time visitor and improve it to provide a better overall experience.

2. Sources for Incoming Traffic

Another Google analytics metric is incoming traffic. It measures the amount of search traffic your site generates. The site traffic can come from many sources. The common traffic sources include:

• Direct Visitors: These are the visitors that already have an idea of your site. They navigate to your website by inputting the URL for your website in their search engines or browsers.
• Search Visitors: These are the category of visitors who find your website through a search query. Most likely, they searched for businesses offering the required.
• Referral Visitors: These groups of visitors wind up on your website after seeing an ad or blog post of your website and services.

Even though these three sources are making up the website’s traffic, it is important to optimize the one responsible for the most traffic. Prioritize the conversion for the one who is bringing the most traffic to your website.

3. Average Page per Session

The ultimate goal of Google Analytics for small businesses is to convert visitors into potential customers. As easy as this may sound, it can be a little bit complicated to achieve. I advise you to monitor the activities of visitors to your site.

Find out what they spend time browsing through, reading, like, share, or comment on. Doing this helps you identify what interests them. You should tweak your web content in line with the information you obtain from your analysis. Tailoring your website to suit the visitor’s needs and interests will help you keep them on your site longer and improve your conversion chances.

4. Return Visitor Conversion

When a visitor returns to your website, it is safe to assume that he/she had a good user experience on your site and was interested in your website. While return visitors are great for your site’s traffic, you need to remember that the end goal is to influence conversion. You can offer special deals or employ other ways to keep them engaged and tempt them to purchase items or make that call to action.

If you are at a loss on achieving this, all you need to do is contact a reputed agency to be good at this. Most of these agencies have a team of IT professionals on standby to give you all the support you need to improve your conversion rate.

5. Value per Visit

The value per visit your site experiences can increase if your website works on its bond with potential customers. Evaluating every visit’s value is hard, but it is the most valued visit when a visitor purchases your brand or affects a call to action. Apart from the buying part, you must maintain this metric to identify the customer’s value per visit.

When customers buy things and experience your service, they leave a review or brand name spread through word of mouth. These reviews are valuable for the growth of your website.

6. Bounce Rate

In Google Analytics, bounce rate refers to a situation where people visit your website and, for some reason, leave almost immediately without browsing or completing any task. If anyone is experiencing this issue on your site, we advise that you take steps to make your landing page interesting.

Incorporate fun, eye-catching pictures, catchy titles, graphics into your web content and design. Having a user-friendly method of logging in and out also helps cut down on the bounce rate.

7. Cost per Conversion

The cost per conversion is one of the crucial metrics of Google Analytics for small businesses. In simple terms, your cost per conversion is the amount of money each conversion costs you. Normally, when you convert your website visitor into a customer, you place a high cost on the conversion.

However, if you fail to do the conversion, you have effectively made losses on optimized profit. The cost per conversion metric is extremely important to your small business. If you are still confused as to how to place a cost, reach out to us.

8. Search Console or Queries

The Google analytics search console section gives a detailed analysis of your organic searches. With the information obtained from the queries, you can pinpoint searches with high position queries but low click-through rates. Consequently, you may also find out that some of your landing pages with relatively high click-through rates have poor positioning.

It would be best if you tackled all the weak areas stopping your website from reaching its full potential. We will walk you through the processes to help you do that.

9. Organic vs. Paid Sessions

Organic search traffic refers to search traffic from users from a search engine results page that requires no form of payment (SERP). Paid traffic is traffic that originates from users directed to your site via an ad they clicked on. The Organic Search metric indicates the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.

On the other hand, paid search gives you an indication of how effective your ad campaigns are. While both of these metrics are important, organic traffic is crucial to your website’s long-term growth. Use traffic from organic search to analyze how well your content performs compared to other organic content.

10. Average Time on Page

Identifying the average time users spend on your page helps provide insight into the quality of the users’ experience. It also indicates how well the targeted marketing campaigns are performing. The average time spent on your page is also an indication of how engaging the website is. Sites with high average periods and or low bounce rate signify high customer engagement.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a free software used to analyze data from websites. The metrics help you collate and analyze relevant data for your website growth. With the insight you have gained about Google Analytics metrics from this article, go ahead and improve your website.