The internet has become the primary place to let the world know about your business or brand. Gone are the days of traditional marketing. In its place, we now have a precise way to build a worldwide audience by using tools that Google Analytics makes available to all of those who are looking for a new way to track information.
There are a handful of metrics available through Analytics that give you the freedom to fine-tune your business website and turn it into a well-oiled machine. Let’s examine some of the important metrics you should start paying attention to if you want to create and maintain a popular business page.
Acquisition
Essentially, acquisition is a metric that gives you insight as to where people are coming from to land on your website. You will be able to see if people are coming from social media, arriving via your newsletter, coming through Google search and more. This is a fantastic metric that can help you in numerous ways.
Use acquisition to decide if your social media marketing is working. Simply track the people coming to your page before your ad campaign and then after/during the campaign. Note the percentage difference. Furthermore, this metric can help you plan ahead and target high-traffic outlets to get you even more views via your marketing.
Conversions
Next, pay attention to your conversions when monitoring your metrics. Essentially, a conversion is a specific action you’d like to see happen when visitors come to your page.
For example, your idea of a conversion could be getting someone to sign up for a newsletter, visit your blog or purchase a product. When you use conversions, you can see how many people perform the action in question. This is important for businesses owners who are trying to steer their audience in a specific direction.
Consider using conversions to your advantage in combination with smart marketing, e.g., give customers a coupon code to sign up for your newsletter, which increases the conversion of getting newsletter subscribers.
Average Session Duration
As the name implies, the average session duration is a metric that determines how long a user stays on your website. It’s hard to pinpoint a great duration time, but you want it to be at least longer than a couple of minutes. Anything less than a couple minutes implies that people are coming to your page and then leaving instantly. Your average session duration is usually directly tied to your bounce rate, which we will get to next.
You can improve your session duration by making your site easy to navigate, adding more quality content and making your site more engaging for your audience or customers. If people have a reason to stick around, most will.
Bounce Rate
As previously mentioned, bounce rate is closely tied to the average session duration. Here’s how it works. Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who load your website, then quickly leave without navigating to any other page on your website.
If you have a bounce rate between 20-40%, you’re in great shape. Anything around 70% is considered average, but lower is better. You want people to stick around, check out your content and hopefully buy a product.
Audience
Your audience metric is extremely valuable, regardless of what kind of business you operate. When you look at the info here, there is plenty of information for you to take in and consider. When it comes to your visitors, you’ll learn their:
• Location
• Gender
• Age
You can use this information to craft your marketing based on your demographic. When you start a business, you likely have a demographic in mind. The audience metric is perfect for allowing you to fine-tune your demographic and target people who can genuinely benefit from the product or service that you’re offering.
Sessions
Sessions are sections of time that customers/viewers spend on your website. An active session includes everything that they did while they were on your business site. You’ll be able to see if they looked at your blog posts, if they checked out your “About Us” page and, of course, whether or not they made a purchase or preorder. You can break down the sessions to see what most people do when they land on your site.
Once you start noticing patterns, make small tweaks to different parts of your website to see if sessions become longer and/or more productive. Most sessions expire after 30 minutes of inactivity, or after midnight in the time zone in which the website was created.
%Exit
Finally, we are going to look at the %Exit metric. This metric is designed to show webmasters the percentage of people who leave any given page. Of course, every session has to end in an exit. But it’s important to know what page resulted in each exit. Pay attention to see if you begin to notice a trend.
For example, if you see that people are mostly leaving on one particular blog page, you may want to go back and have a look at the blog post in question. There is a chance that the content there is not up to snuff; there could also be a broken link, or maybe the menus are not working properly. That’s the brilliance of the %Exit metric -- you get a clear path to the page that’s turning people away. Use this information to your advantage to get more viewers and keep them there longer.
There are plenty of small metrics used in Google Analytics, and they all have their purpose for business owners. If you want to make the most of your website, take advantage of as many metrics as possible. Use the information that’s available to you to paint the big picture and build a thriving business page that keeps your customers happy for years to come.
