How to Read Google Analytics: Part I

There are many elements to Google Analytics so we will break this down into a series starting with the basics.

Google Analytics: Basic Statistics

• Visits: the number of times your website has been viewed. These include visitors who come back
  and check your site frequently. This is definitely a key indicator but shouldn't be looked at alone.
• Pageviews: the number of pages that has been visited over the set time frame.
• Pages per Visit: This number is an average number of pages a visitor views when they come to the website. The higher the number the more pages a visitor looked at during one session on your website.
• Bounce Rate: This number tells you how many people came to the site and left right away ("bounced").This means the visitor came to one page on the site and did not click through to any other page on the website. The lower this percentage the better. If you have a blog it is more likely to have a higher bounce rate as visitors come to read the article and typically leave without clicking elsewhere and the higher number is not to be alarming.
• % of New Visits: As it indicates this number is the percentage of visitors that are new and have not been to the website before.
• Visitors: How many different people came to the site as opposed to visits which indicates how many times those people visited.
• Map Overview: This shows the distribution of visitors by Country and then by city and town. This is a great section to check your bounce rate by area. If you are catering to a certain location you would like to see a low bounce rate for those areas and you may not be as concerned about visitors from more distant places such as other countries. This is dependent on your industry and specific business.
• Traffic Sources: This is a pie chart that lets you know where your traffic is coming from. It is broken down to the 3 different ways traffic gets to your website: Directly from a user entering your address in the URL, Search Engines -Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., and Referring sites - other websites that link to yours.
• Content Overview: This lets you know in descending order which pages are the most popular (most viewed) on your website.

These are the basic statistics Google Analytics pulls. If you have a store on your website there is also an e-commerce section that can give you valuable statistics about top selling products etc. We have just scratched the surface of what information Google Analytics can provide. If you are interested in enhancing your Search Engine Optimization this is typically where you want to start to get a baseline or where we would begin before making changes. Contact Us if you would like to discuss our services including Analytic Reports or Search Engine Optimization.