Google Analytics
What is Google Analytics?
Peter Drucker, renowned management consultant is often quoted “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” If your website is critical to the growth and success of your business then you need to manage it. Google offers a FREE tool called Google Analytics, which enables you to measure a variety of Website Key Performance Indicators (WKPI). Google Analytics helps you manage your website in a way that enables continuous improvement.
WKPIs provide insight into:
- Who is coming to your website (Audience)
- How they got there (Acquisition)
- What they did while they were there (Behavior)
Audience Insights
Audience insight begins with sessions, defined as a group of interactions over a period of time. A session can represent a single page view or multiple page visits and if the visitor is new or returning. Session data tracks how much time is spent on each page, where the session began and what page it ended on.
Bounce Rate is another metric which looks at the percentage of visitors who leave the website after viewing only one page. So imagine a Homepage with a 100% bounce rate, this always means that the visitor never looked at any other page. A 0% bounce rate means visitors travelled deeper into the website.
Other audience data includes Demographics (age and gender), Interests (what pages they read), Geo (language, location), Behavior, Mobile, Technology and more.
Acquisition Insights
Acquisition provides meaningful data on where the traffic to your website is coming from. The data is classified from the following six sources:
- OrganicSearch
- Direct when a visitor typed your domain name into the browser
- Through Paid Search like a Google Ad
- From Referral sites where your website URL is listed and clicked on
- From Social media sites
- Other, is all other traffic
Behavior Insights
Behavior shows the path visitors take when traveling between the pages, and other key metrics such as how much time was spent on the page. Behavior provides insights into what visitors do on the website – did they fill out a form, purchase a product, etc.
Tracking Code
Google Analytics is free, but does require some technical skill to install what is known as a tracking code. A tracking code is a few lines of programming code called a snippet which is added to the website. If you use a tracking code on your website your Privacy Policy should say that you use them and what you will do with the data.