If you wish to improve your results, you must start measuring them. When you are doing marketing it is important to do this, because only then you will be able to know what is working for you in order to improve it.
Let’s look at a quote from Sir William that we can apply to anything we do in life:
“What is not defined, cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded”.
And if that weren’t enough, we also have the Pareto principle, which states that “80% of the results come from 20% of the cause”.
In a nutshell. There is 20% of what you are doing in your work, which is generating 80% of the results for you. This is better known as the 80/20 rule.
You may or may not know it, but knowing what that 20% is is key to focus on what is already working for you to improve your return on investment. You invest the same to earn more. Whether it’s time or money.
These are two good reasons to convince you of the importance of measuring.
And since it is important, here we are going to explain what are the 8 most important Google Analytics metrics to start in this measuring world.
Users
The first metric is users. You can look at it to see the total number of users. Users who have logged in at least once in their life to your website.
It’s good to know that if a person logs into a browser and then changes browser to log into your website. That person will be counted as a new user. Different browser, different user.
New Users
The second metric is new users. By its name you will already know what this metric is about. This metric will let you know how many new users you gained in a given time. Either in a day, week, month or year that you specify.
The good thing about it is that you will be able to know how much you are growing on your website. And if you compare it with the “users” metric you will be able to have an estimate of how many users are becoming regular users.
Sessions
The third metric is sessions. In it you will be able to know the total number of sessions that have been done. Ok, but what is a session?
A session is a visit to your website, regardless of the page, where everything a user does and the time they spent is recorded.
If I were to give you an example, it would look like this:
A user enters your home page (1), accesses the blog (2), visits a piece of content (3), returns to the blog (4), visits another piece of content (5), finally closes your website and all of this took 17 minutes in total.
As you can see, the user made a session visiting 5 pages and the session lasted 17 minutes.
When does a session start? When the user enters your website. And when does it end? When the user:
- Stops interacting for more than 30 minutes.
- When they leave your website.
This would be an explanation of a session. But this metric doesn’t measure all of that, it measures the total number of sessions that have been done on your website.
This number will always be higher than the number of users. Because you can imagine that a user can do more than one session.
Sessions per user
The fourth metric is sessions per user. With it you will be able to know the average number of sessions made by users.
The good thing about this metric is that with it you can validate the quality of the content from your website. Since returning users come back because they liked the content. And to be liked, you have to provide value.
Number of page views
The fifth metric is the number of page views. Here you will be able to know the number of visits to a specific page. Do you want to know how many visits your home page has? With this metric you can find out.
It is important to know that this metric does not take into account the number of users. Since a user can make several visits.
Now, just like the “average number of sessions”, this metric helps you to know which pages are of interest to your audience. Pages where it is good to put the focus for attracting more customers.
Pages per session
The sixth metric is pages per session. Most users visit more than one page. This metric will show you the average number of pages users visit.
If you have an online store, the number may be higher than for a normal website. Because it is common for a user to visit several pages before making a purchase.
To increase this metric it is good to apply an interlinking strategy where you can encourage the user to move from one page to another. And like the other metrics, this metric will help you to know the interest of users with your website.
Bounce rate
The seventh metric is the bounce rate. A user enters a page and has two options. Leaving your website or interacting with buttons or links.
In the cases where users don’t interact, you can say that they bounced. They entered and left. Without touching anything.
With this metric you will be looking to measure how much the bounce rate is per user of a web page.
Now, if you see that you have a high bounce rate, don’t think it’s bad. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. The important thing to know is how to distinguish when the bounce rate is good or bad.
Average session duration
The eighth and last metric is the average session duration. With this metric you can see how long users typically spend in a session. The longer the time users spend, the more your website is engaging with users.
Conclusion
These are the most relevant metrics, as they can give you ideas, clues and conclusions about what is working, pleasing and disfavoring on your website.
You will be able to know where the traffic moves the most, which are those contents that move the traffic and thus be able to make a content strategy based on these data.
