4 Critical Google Analytics Metrics You Should Know
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the primary core of any online marketing approach. It’s the schematic around which your digital marketing revolves around. Many business owners out there prefer managing their own online marketing, while others opt for professional and superior digital marketing services. Regardless of which method you choose, there are specific critical metrics you need to keep an eye on according to our specialist SEO agency in Manchester.
Why Some Metrics Matter More
We’re not just talking about generic elements like keyword rankings, even though it’s a legitimate metric to be aware of. Some metrics merely display how successful your campaign was and not the actual tangible benefits to your business. This is why it’s crucial to know which metrics to be aware of and which ones to ignore.
Google analytics can throw up a lot of numbers and indices that can mean a lot of things. Often, you can get confused by the sheer amount of data you have to process. Knowing the right metrics to track can simplify this process. And all in all, it will give you a much better grasp of your digital marketing approach and what direction to take.
Here are the top four metrics and indices to keep track of:
Users
Here, your users represent the number of visitors your website got in a particular timeline. This timeframe can be a week, month, or even a full year if you want a bird’s eye view. Tracking the number of visitors on your website is one of the straightforward ways of assessing your progress. If you are investing in a new marketing strategy, but the number of visitors has remained the same, the new approach may not be working.
Keeping track of the users’ metric can help you trace the growth of new users also. If you simply keep a tab on your website’s traffic volume, you may miss out on some subtle details. For example, a higher volume of traffic does not necessarily mean your customer base is increasing. It may simply mean that your existing clients are visiting your website more often. With the Users metric, you can determine the number of individual visitors on your website without confusing it with multiple visits from the same group of users. For instance, if a customer visits your website two times while another visits four times, you’d have a total of six sessions. But the number of users would remain at two.
Assuming you put out an advert in a certain time period, you see no increase in users. It means your resource will be better utilized in other types of ad campaigns.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is simply put, the percentage or number of visitors on your website who fulfilled or achieved a purpose. People may come to your website for different reasons. Just because there is traffic does not necessarily mean there is quality engagement. Whether it’s filling out an entry form, signing up for a service, watching a video, making a purchase, etc., the conversion rate is where you see real progress. It’s the immediate and real measure of how successful your website is running.
The conversion rate allows you to assess your marketing strategies and website features together. If you observe that conversions are lower, you can take a look at your content to see what you can improve. You can also locate specific issues that are hampering conversion rates. If a particular form-entry has decreasing conversion rates, you can pinpoint the problem around the form instead of scouring the whole website.
Top Landing Pages
These are primarily those pages on your website that get the most engagement and interaction from your visitors. They may also include stand-alone web pages that welcome visitors from external links. But it’s a crucial metric for all the other pages on your website too.
Landing pages are closely related to your conversion rates because the two elements go hand in hand. They’re a great way of finding out which pages on your website are doing well and which pages need improvement. When you browse your top landing pages, you get an idea of which pages engage your visitors the most.
A great opportunity to utilize the information from your top pages is to build new pages or create new content. The top landing pages give you an idea of the type of content that is working well. Based on your business and approach, you can determine what type of content to create. The content can mirror or complement the elements of those pages that are doing better than others. This way, you can build a schematic of inter-connected visuals and content that unites your website’s different components.
Traffic Source/Referral
Traffic referrals are a metric that works exceedingly well with the three other parameters mentioned here. It’s the metric that tells you where your visitors and traffic came from. In digital marketing, you will often put out links, ads, and invitations to your website on different platforms. When you know which of these sources brought traffic to your site, you can zone in on the successful links and ads.
For example, you post a sales link on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and your traffic increases. The referral will allow you to ascertain which of these platforms brought in the most visitors. You may have more followers on Facebook, but Twitter may direct more traffic to your website. This distinction can enable you to tweak and reform your online marketing based on the audience.
If you find that a particular platform isn’t bringing in as much traffic as you’d hoped, you can make changes to that specific source. It’s also a great way to build networks and contacts with other businesses. If an associate blog article brings in more users than usual, you can strengthen ties with that blog for the future.
The Bottomline
Google Analytics provides you with the most helpful yet often complicated set of numbers and data. Scouring, through all the data, can be time-consuming and counter-productive. Knowing which metrics to focus on can help you concentrate your efforts towards what matters the most.
