Google Analytics Basics

Google Analytics is a valuable tool that allows you to track visitors to your website in a very detailed and organized way. Once the tracking code (called an “urchin”) is in place on the pages of your website, you can view reports that tell you exactly where visitors landed and the path they took through your website. This information can be useful in optimizing your website for your users to ensure that their experience on your website is a good one.

One of the most powerful metrics that Google Analytics provides is the “bounce rate” metric. This metric allows you to view the bounce rate (which is defined as the percentage of users that leave your website after only viewing one page) of your website, but also the bounce rate of your individual pages. You can also view the bounce rate for your website by traffic source, which is one of the most important ways to find out which of your advertising strategies are performing well for you. Imagine your Google Adwords campaign is driving traffic to your website for the search term “women’s clothing” and “women’s purses”. If every user who visits your website from the keyword “women’s purses” leaves without clicking deeper into your website, you know that your landing page is not optimized for that keyword. You can change the landing page at that point, or you can delete the keyword from your marketing campaign, but you certainly do not want to pay for clicks that almost exclusively result in bounces.

Google Analytics also allows you to track your eCommerce performance. You can view the exact path your visitors took from landing page to conversion, and analyze how to make that path shorter. You can view the website or search engine that has referred the most sales, and you can use that information to garner more profits.

Google Analytics can also be used to view your top exit pages. This can be a great way to see where the conversion trail breaks down. If users on your website are constantly exiting on your product pages after traveling through your homepage and your category pages, you should consider re-designing the product page to appeal to more users. For most webmasters, the homepage will be the place where the majority of exits happen, simply because it is the place where the majority of page views happen. Do not worry about redesigning your homepage when it appears as the page with the highest exit count.

The single biggest mistake users make when using Google Analytics is that they do not act on the data they receive. You can analyze data until you’re blue in the face, but if you never make any decisions based on the data you receive, the data is essentially worthless. When Google Analytics finds weak points on your website, change them immediately! Do not wait to gather more data, or you will end up losing in the long run. Be deliberate but decisive, and your visitors will reward you for it.