Part 2 – Understanding the Statistics


In Part 1 of Tracking your Success with Analytics we talked about how beneficial the Google Analytics tool is for measuring your site’s performance and how to set it up. Now that you have hopefully had a chance to click around the system a little, we will gain a better idea of what is going on and what will be important for you to learn. There are an abundance of options and statistics to look at, but chances are you won’t need most of these quite yet so don’t feel too overwhelmed!

Below are some of the key metrics that will show up in the Standard Reporting ‘Overview’ section that you will get to know. Be sure to check the timeframe in the top right corner so that you’re getting the right dates you’re looking for.


Basic Statistics from your Overview. They will show as 0 when no site activity has been tracked yet





 

                                                            
 
Visits - How many times people have come to the site.
Unique Visitors - The number of individuals who visited the site.
Pageviews – The amount of times people have viewed your site and its pages.
Pages / Visit – The average amount of pages each of your visitors are viewing before leaving.
% New Visits – The rate of visitors to the site who have not been there before.
Avg. Visit Duration: The average amount of time people are spending on your pages before leaving.
Bounce rate - The percentage of people who only viewed one page then left. It is common for a blog to have a high bounce rate as people generally read one article and exit.
Exit rate – The percentage of people who have left a page without viewing further pages.

 
 
 Standard reporting options allow for a deeper analysis
 

Filters

It is recommended that you set up an alternate profile with a filter on it that will filter out visitors from your own company office. This way the results are not artificially inflated by staff looking at your website (especially if your initial traffic is slow and many changes are being made to your site).

Goals

Another important practice is to set up goals for your website. When a goal is completed it is called a ‘conversion’. You have complete control over the goals on your website; however you do need to manually set them up. General goals may be a visitor purchasing an item, or visitors that have clicked through from the home page to the contact us page, or subscribing to a newsletter. Goals can be set up to be sequential where you can track the progress of every step of the goal, i.e. this could used to track the shopping cart system of a webpage and finding out at what part of the process people are abandoning their cart.







View of the Google Analytics Dashboard. The black squares are where the data is displayed. The dashboard provides a basic overview of your website's progress. Click standard reporting to get into your overview









There are many tutorial videos for Google Analytics available on the Conversion University youtube channel. Google Analytics can also be integrated with Google Webmaster Tools, Google Adsense, and Google Adwords providing quality data across all platforms.

To Do


o    Test that views and visitors are being recorded in your analytics account

o    Become familiar with selecting different timeframes and viewing different statistics

o    Setup filters to receive more realistic data

o    Setup goals to track your ‘success’ points



For HR / Psychs

When setting up goals, think about all the small steps and activities involved in leading to a positive outcome to your business. If it’s incoming phone calls, it may be an idea to set up those who click through to ‘contact us’ details as a goal, and give it a dollar value that you think reflects the average contribution it makes. Other goals that aren’t directly related to purchasing (such as an online cart system) include; clicking on email options, alerts and newsletter subscriptions, creating an online profile, viewing pricing details of certain services, and sharing content with other users. If you notice that the pages containing these conversions are receiving high bounce rates, it may mean that you could be more convincing and to the point in communicating the core benefits.


Part 1 - Intro and Install

Google Analytics is a highly integrated net tool that puts a ‘finger on the pulse’ of your site’s activity. Without it, web marketers and small business owners find it difficult to know how their website efforts are performing. Google provides support for Google Analytics users in an effort to make it accessible to everyone. Having a basic familiarity with HTML will help with setting up GA. If not, you won’t lose out. In general, all webmasters and web marketers should be using Analytics frequently!

Here are just a few things Analytics will allow you to do:

  • Check how many people are coming to your site in any chosen timeframe, from where, and how they’re searching for you
  • Check your most popular pages for visiting activity, and which are generating sales and other conversions
  • Check how many people are new or returning users, how long they stay for and how many exit immediately 
  • Most importantly: you can use all the above and more to decide how well / not so well just about everything is going!



An example of the Google Analytic tracking code. Here it is inserted in the Footer (bottom) of every page. It is Written in Java script and is entirely generated by google, so do not worry about not being able to understand it. Google can only track pages with the code, so Make sure the code is installed on every page of Your website. 

You can sign up for a free account at www.google.com/analytics, enter your gmail account or make one. Once there you need to enter your website address which will give you a tracking code. Google doesn’t automatically track your webpage, so in order to do so you need to install the provided tracking code.
Once installed, allow a few days for data to be generated. The sooner you implement it and have a plan of continually setting up and tracking new pages the better. Next we will look into what this program can do to give you that “Wow, I know stuff about my site now!” factor.

Hit List

        Made a Google Analytics account
        Installed the necessary tracking code
        Get a basic feel of the site’s navigation