Important Google Analytic Metrics Businesses should Track

When it comes to tracking and measuring your marketing campaign effort with Google Analytics, there are several important key performance indicators (KPIs) every marketer should look out for.

But First

What are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

These are measurable metrics a company or an organisation use in tracking and evaluating the success of their goals. Most times it is used in evaluating a company's marketing plans.

What Your KPIs Should Be?

When evaluating your success using KPIs, here are some things you need to put in mind;

• Your KPIs should be measurable/quantifiable

• Should be actionable

• Should only contain factors critical to meeting your goals

• Should be tied to your business goals 

• Should be applied consistently for the successful achievement of the company's goals

In this article, we are going to look at Important Google Metrics Businesses should Track

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Important Google Analytics Metrics Businesses Should Track

Whatever the kind of business you are into, be it e-commerce or normal online business, there are several important metrics you should track to measure the success of your business.

To get started, you need to have GA tracking code on your website. Once Installed it takes 24 hours for the data to start coming in.

Once registered and you logged into GA, there are four categories of data metrics offered;

• Audience: Here you get reports of visitors to your website. The Pageviews, New vs returning visitors, Sessions, bounce rates, and more

• Acquisition: This category deals with traffic sources. It simply tells you what channel your audience is using to access your website. It gives you data from organic search, social media, Google ads and referrals e.t.c.

• Behaviour: This category simply tells you of how your pages are performing. Here you get to know your top landing pages and exit page, site speed, and goals.

• Conversion: Conversation means different things to a different website, blogs and businesses. It can be the subscription of newsletter, sales, sending a contact form. Carrying out of a CTA and so on. When you set objectives or goals for your website, these sections let you know if these goals are being achieved. However, a conversation cannot work if you have not set goals for your website on GA

Now let us take a look at those Important Google Analytic Metrics  Businesses should Track

Page views:

By clicking Audience  > Behaviour > “frequency and recency” you get a more detailed analysis of the number of views your page had within a month period. The number of views gives you an idea of the popularity of your website, company or blog.

New vs Returning Visitors: 

This particular section works with cookies and can be confusing considering that we all have the option to turn off cookies on our browser or delete cookies already generated. But then it is very important. 

They also tell you how popular your website is. Pageviews let you know the number of visitors your site get within a month, but the ratio of New vs returning visitor let you know if these views are all majorly from old visitors or it is expanding and incorporating new visitors too.

You can access this report metrics by  clicking Audience  > Behaviour > “New vs Returning”

Sessions/Duration:

By clicking Audience  > Behaviour > “Engagement”,  an interface comes up showing you the session and duration spent on your website. You will notice that they are divided into groups from the shortest duration to the longest. Longer sessions mean the audience find your website interesting and informative. Shorter session means either your website isn’t interesting or that audience quickly finds what they are looking for. Shorter sessions determine your bounce rate.

Bounce Rates:

Bounce rate is the percentage of time spent on a single web page by a user. This particular data is very important to all website as this can affect your website ranking on search engine positively or negatively. It shows you the percentage of users that exit your website immediately after they visit it. 

A high bounce rate means that visitor does not find your website attractive, or user-friendly. Though sometimes this might not be the case, high bounce rate might be as a result of users finding what they want immediately on your website. 

If your bounce rate is high then your website can never rank top on search engines. So how do you check bounce rates? From Audience > overview > Scroll Down and you get a summary of your bounce rate. 

For more detailed bounce rate for each section under “Audience” you can filter out bounce sessions and non-bounce sessions from the segment tab you find right beside the “All Users” tab.

Bounce rate is calculated from 0 seconds on GA. To get good bounce rates, users must spend at least 10 seconds on your website

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Google Ads: 

When you click on Acquisition > Google Ads you will get reports of the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. Here you get metrics of your keywords, search queries, final URL and an hourly visit to your site.

To get this working, your Google Ads account should be linked to your Google Analytics accounts.

Source/Medium

Source/Medium report tells you where your audience is coming from. This helps you know where to concentrate your marketing effort and most importantly where your clients are gathered. To access this report just click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium

Search Console

If you want to know the exact keywords your client/audience use in finding you, then you need to look at Acquisition > search console > queries.

Page Load Time: 

From Behaviour > “Site Speed” you get to know how much time your page takes to load and also the suggestion on how you can reduce its loading time. The information here is based on your top landing pages within a month period. You will also be given suggestion on how you can reduce their loading time.

Search Terms: 

I consider this area important because it gives you an idea of the type of content your audience want. If you have installed a customised Google site search on your website. Search terms let you in on the keywords/terms users are looking for on in your website.

Publisher:

If you linked your AdSense or any ad publisher to your GA, you can monitor your revenue and know which of your pages are bringing in the sales.

Conversion:

This is the most Important Google Analytic Metrics  Businesses should Track.

Conversation means different things to different businesses. It can be the subscription of newsletter, sales, sending a contact form. Carrying out of a CTA and so on. When you set objectives or goals for your website, these sections let you know if these goals are being achieved. However, a conversation cannot work if you have not set goals for your website on GA - in other words no goals, no conversation data. To set up goals scroll down this article

Conclusion

As I have earlier said every data analysed on GA is important and also depends on your website, blog or business objectives. For business owners setting up goals for sales and any other services rendered is important, so also is the of “new vs returning” visitors, pages views, bounce rate and several other options offered by GA. For those who focus perhaps on a particular Gender, age group, location and others, GA also offers data for these, check under the audience.

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