There’s a good chance that if you’re here, you’ve at least heard of Google Analytics and are either using it or thinking of using it. By the end of this article, we’ll hopefully help you understand why so many companies are choosing to have Google Analytics implemented into their site by explaining the engagement metrics, search traffic metrics, and SEO metrics that GA tracks.

First off, what is Google Analytics?

For those of you who might be new to Google Analytics, this is a free tool that collects data on your website to help businesses better understand how users are interacting with their site. This has revolutionized the way people could find out the type of traffic their website was getting because prior to GA, people had to resort to analyzing reports of server log files.

How does it work?

In order for Google Analytics to track your website’s data, the global site tag needs to be integrated into your website. Once done correctly, the data will then be collected and GA will generate reports that can help you interpret all of the metrics that you want to focus on. Within Google Analytics, you can even filter the data that you see in each of the following reports and later in this article, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into each:

• • Audience
  • Acquisition
  • Behavior
  • Conversions

What’s the difference between metrics and dimensions?

Dimensions are great when you’re trying to segment your raw data but in case you’re not exactly sure what a dimension or metric is, let’s clear that up now before we continue!

Metrics are quantitative variables that you would be getting from GA, such as sessions, page views, and conversions.

Dimensions are categorical variables and can help narrow down your data, such as filtering by landing page, user location, or even user device.

So when we say dimensions are helpful to segment your raw data, think of it like this. If you had one option to see how many total people are visiting your website and another option to see how many people were visiting each page on your website, which would you prefer?

What are some dimensions I should look at?

Each report in Google Analytics contains different dimensions that you can look at. In this section we’ll separate each report and talk about some of the important dimensions that might be helpful for you to know about!

Audience

Under the audience report there are different dimensions that you are able to view. Under the Demographics dimension, both the age ranges and genders of those viewing your website can be seen. Google is also able to track the interests of your visitors, the languages they speak, as well as where they are located geographically. The behavior dimension displays data on whether or not a visitor is new or not, how frequently they visit, and how long people tend to stay on your site. Some other helpful dimensions in this report are technology and mobile because they help you see what browser or operating systems visitors come from and what devices they use.

Acquisition

The acquisition report helps you understand exactly what sources are leading to your website and where your traffic is coming from. If properly set up, you can see how well your Google Ads are running, the data your Search Console has collected, and the success of your social media campaigns.

Behavior

This report tells you data about your users once they get to your site. For example, Site Content shows you the metrics of all pages on your site while Site Speed will show you the average loading time for visitors on each page. This allows you to see exactly which pages you need to address. To find out more about why loading time is so important, check out our other article on Core Web Vitals. If your website has a search bar that allows for visitors to look up specific content, you would also be able to see that data under this report. Lastly, if you have events set up, you can monitor the metrics of each event category here as well.

Conversions

Under this report, you’re able to track your desired goals, which are the conversions that you have specified. Some examples of goals that you may want to track include seeing how many people get to a designated page, seeing how many people sign up for a newsletter, seeing how many visitors stay on your site longer than a certain amount of time, or seeing how many people browse a certain number of pages on your site.

What do all of these metrics mean?

In this section we’ll be taking a look at the different metrics you may come across when studying your Google Analytics data.

Pageviews

This tells you the total number of pages viewed. If you don’t have any people viewing a certain page it could mean you don’t have any links on your site directing there. However, if you have few clicks on a page, it could mean that the people who do go to that particular page are highly relevant users. Having high-volume traffic to your page might be good, but keep in mind that it’s also possible that a lot of low relevant users have also viewed it.

Average Session Duration

Some people stay a while on your website while others leave your site almost immediately. Based on what information you’re providing on your website, you can infer what your data might mean. For example if your page is providing them with business hours or an address, the content may still be relevant despite people visiting your site and leaving immediately after getting what they needed. If your content is a blog article then people staying long on your website could mean that the content is relevant and they are spending the time to read it all.

Bounce Rate

This metric tracks the percentage of sessions where there were no interactions at all with the page. A low bounce rate means people are staying on your site and interacting with it while a high bounce rate means users either get what they need and leave or just choose not to engage with your content.

Conversion Rate

This is the percent of sessions that result in a goal being reached. This is a great way to measure how well your site is doing if you’re trying to sell your visitors on a product. For example, if you don’t have a high conversion rate, this could indicate that you may have an obstacle that visitors are facing that is stopping them from fully completing their purchase. If you see a high conversion rate it’s likely that your content is optimized for conversions.

These are just some of the many ways that Google Analytics can serve your business and help you better your marketing strategy. The deeper you dive into GA, the more powerful you’ll realize this tool is.