By Clare Woods, Digital Account Executive
You have Google Analytics on your site. You know that it can help you measure campaigns and trends, but where do you start? How do you avoid Paralysis by Analysis and get to the data that is going to help you to drive smart business decisions and maximize your marketing budget? Below are 10 Metrics that are great starting points to make the most out of Google Analytics.
- Audience | Overview – This metric measures the total visits to your site. Looking at this view over extended periods of time let’s you see trends for seasonality and measure year over year numbers and campaign effectiveness.
- Audience | Demos – This is a feature that you will need to enable within Analytics. Once enabled, you will be able to pull demographic information on who is coming to your site, including age & gender. Keep in mind that this information is taken from a sample size of your visitors but can still be helpful in driving targeting decisions for paid media campaigns.
- Audience | Mobile | Overview – This metric breaks out the percentage of traffic that comes from Mobile, Desktop, and Tablet. While mobile has grown exponentially and usually provides a lionshare of web traffic, there are still some industries that have more desktop traffic and/or see higher conversion rates from desktop, so it is important to understand the role that each type of traffic plays on the road to conversion.
- Acquisition | All Traffic | Channel – This metric is most helpful if you are running a paid media digital campaign or looking to measure changes in your Organic or Direct traffic while running an SEO program or a traditional media campaign. It breaks out how users are reaching your site, including Organic Traffic, Local Listings, Paid Search, Paid Social, and other.
- Acquisition | All Traffic | Source/Medium – This metric is similar to the above, but becomes important if you are running a campaign that utilizes UTM Codes. UTM codes help to streamline referral traffic so that you can understand the performance of particular campaigns or creatives.
- Behavior | Site Content | All Pages – Wondering what the top pages of your website are? This option rates each page in order of most traffic to least and can help you to customize campaigns to drive traffic to your most important pages.
- Behavior | Flow – This page can be a little confusing to understand on first glance, but the point is to show you how users are flowing through your site. For example, what is the page that most users visit following the home page? Is this the page that you would like them to go to? You can’t always control consumer behavior, but looking into these insights can help with future campaign or site designs.
- Conversions | Goals – Please note for this metric you must have goals set up, but this can be easily don’t by choosing pages or events that you would like to measure. Once these are in place, GA will show you how many of these occur in your specified timeframe. Once you have had them in place, you can also compare these conversion numbers month over month or year over year to look for trends.
- Conversions | Reverse Goal Path – This metric combines behavior flow and conversion goals and let’s you know how users came to complete the conversion metrics you laid out. This can also help with campaign and Web Page Design.
- Conversions | Goals | Goal Flow – This view dives deeper into a particular goal and breaks out for you which referral source these conversions came from in a quick glance.
Here at Pixelent, understanding and using analytics to craft thoughtful campaigns is the bedrock of we do. Let us know how we can help today!
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