Google Analytics is one of the most crucial tools you need to be using if you have a website.
But when you log in, are you overwhelmed with the myriad of statistics, tables, pie charts and percentages that appear when you start clicking around?
Everyone knows that you should be keeping an eye on how many people visit your website, how long they stay and how many pages they visit, but what about if you want to dig a little deeper and use the data to help drive more sales?
Here are 7 key stats that you should be checking on Google Analytics every month.
Acquisition – All Traffic – Source/Medium
The first thing to check each month is where your traffic is coming from: is it from Google, Bing, social media channels or other sources? Organic traffic is important as then you know that you’re appearing on those all-important search results pages. You also don’t want all your traffic coming from social media as if these platforms change how you reach your audience you may be faced with a decline in traffic to your website.
Look through all sources for referral traffic from other websites. Often people may link to you and you’ll never know about it until someone clicks on that link and ends up on your website. Then you’ll see a visit from the website that linked to you. You can reach out to them and thank them for the link which is great for relationship building. Making that connection may result in more links to your website from that source too.
Behaviour – New vs Returning
This metric is interesting for you to see how many people are first time visitors to your website and how many are returning visitors. If you’re business relies on repeat customers, this stat will help you see if you’re retaining your customers or not.
Demographics – Age
If your business has a specific age range for your target market, this statistic can help you see if you’re attracting the right type of customer to your website. You may think that your product is most popular with people aged 20-30 but if your stats show that most people who are converting are aged 45-54, use that to inform your marketing strategy going forward.
Acquisition – Search Console – Queries
This is a great new-ish option from Google Analytics. You need to link Search Console and Google Analytics (which just takes a couple of clicks) in order to see this data.
Most of the queries will not be available to view due to privacy issues, but if you get a decent level of traffic to your website, you will be able to get some great information on what people have Googled before clicking on your website. Look for phrases about topics you have not written about, or could write more about, and use this when you’re doing your content planning.
Acquisition – Social – Conversions
If you’re using social media channels to drive sales, looking at social conversions will give you a super quick snapshot of how many conversions you’re getting on each social platform. This can help you decide where to focus your social media efforts.
Behaviour – Site Speed – Speed Suggestions
Got concerns about your page speed? Then you need to check out speed suggestions from Google Analytics. For each page on your website, you can get tailored page speed suggestions from Google on what you can improve. Some of these will most likely require assistance from a web developer but they’re a great starting point – especially if you concentrate on pages with the most frequent traffic.
Behaviour – Site Content – All Pages
This is one of my favourite metrics to track on Google Analytics. It shows you how many page views each page has had for any given date range. If you want to see which posts have been most viewed and read for the longest, this stat will give you that.
Change the date range to compare monthly vs all time data and see if there are any posts that are consistently bringing traffic to your website.