Learning basic Google Analytics is a quick, free way to make your website a customer magnet.
Clients often ask me about how to improve the traffic to their WordPress websites. However, many of them are unclear on how many people visit their websites on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. They aren’t aware of the page visits to their website or numbers of unique visitors.
At some point, they had a website designer set up their website and maybe mention Analytics in the overwhelming discussion of setting up pages, blog posts, SEO and spam. If they were lucky, their website designer set up Google Analytics for their website. To find out more about the visits to the website, the most basic way to find out is to review the Analytics of the website.
Google Analytics is set up through a Google account and linked through the website via a plugin or UA code placed into the header code of the website. Once that code is placed on the website, it will start to report information about the numbers of visitors, length of time on the website, bounce rate, demographics of the visitor, pages visited and more.
To better understand Google Analytics, I wanted to touch on some of the information you will find when you access the dashboard of your account.
- Users is the number of unique users visiting the website in the designated time period.
- Sessions is the number of times people went to the website (which is why the number is higher than the number of users. It means some people came onto the website multiple times).
- Pageviews is the number of pages viewed on the website (again, a higher number because people hopefully visited multiple pages).
- Session Duration is the amount of time spent on the website on average for the month. You are looking for this number to increase over time because it means more people spent longer on the website.
- Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who accessed the website but left before going to any additional pages. You want the bounce rate to decrease over time.
On the Acquisition report on your dashboard, you can view the reporting of how people arrived at your website. These are the sources reported:
- Organic Search is people who did a Google search for a keyword or keyphrase and clicked into the website from the search results.
- Referrals are people who clicked a link from another page to access your website.
- Direct Link is people who typed in your domain name (one or the other).
- Social Referrals are the people who clicked to the website from a social media website or link.
Another helpful section of Google Analytics is the Users Flow section under Audience. Here, you can view where people clicked within your website after arriving at their original page. This will help you understand their behavior on the website and what pages draw their attention after the first page.
The reports on the Google Analytics dashboard can help guide you on the interests and behaviors of your website visitors to help improve traffic to your website. This knowledge will also help you understand how people access your website and where you can spend your time and money to gain more targeted visitors to your website.
