Google Analytics is a service that retrieves and displays statistics about website traffic. As some definitions can be confusing, we wrote this document to help you assess and understand your reports.

Google analytics allows you to get a step ahead, well only if you use it right. You can use data to help leverage the business decisions you make on your website. The goal is for it to help with the design of your website and it’s continuous improvement. For example, we can gather the stats for the number of enquiries we have had from a form. Then we can compare that with the amount of specific page views the webpage has received. If we see a huge difference in numbers we can come to a conclusion that maybe a new design would help persuade users to fill out the form. Our goal would be to increase conversion on that form. Using the power of Google Analytics you can easily make data-driven marketing decisions.

Google Analytics is a free service. This means any person with web knowledge, for example, a web developer can implement it on your website. You can then use its website to generate reports. These reports can help analyse what works and what doesn’t work on your website. We can then come to a verdict based on the report on how to improve the users experience on your website. This with the overarching goal of increasing sales. I’ve included a table below with the main definitions you may find in a Google Analytics report for easy digestion.

Google Analytics Terms and Definitions

Pageviews

How many visits, total, downloaded and viewed this specific web page.

Page

Defines the information for each page on the website.

Unique pageviews

Show how many individual users, total, downloaded and viewed this specific web page – if a computer visits the same page more than once it is no longer considered ‘unique’.

Entrances

If this is the first page a visitor enters when viewing the site, it is considered an Entrance.

Avg. Time on Page

>Aggregate mean time spent on each page.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of people that leave after having only visited one page – a high bounce rate is usually a negative signal, indicating that visitors are unsatisfied and leave, although it could mean they find exactly what they need on the first page.

% Exit

If this is the last page a visitor enters when viewing the site, it is considered an Exit.

Page Value

Can be used to assign a monetary value for each visitor on a web page, so you can assess the financial losses within both bounces and exits.

At MAKE A WEB we like to include Google Analytics in all the websites we create as part of our Marketing. It allows for you the customer to see the traffic you get to the website. It’s certainly a good feeling to see customers coming to your website. It’s important to know that Google Analytics does, in fact, provide a lot more information than just the amount of visitors. You can also find out the locations of your visitors. You can find out the most popular pages and posts on your website. You can then find out what websites send traffic to your website. If you have an e-commerce website it can help identify the customers shopping behaviour. Once you understand how your users are browsing your website, you can figure out what content they like. Then you can tailor your strategy to help grow your traffic.

As a final hurrah, Google has so many awesome resources that we can utilise. Google Analytics for Beginners offers a full course breakdown and overview on how to become a pro at this stuff, enjoy! I also spent some time reading through an article about certain Google analytics reports which was interesting. It shows different types of reports you might find useful on your journey.