Every business owner needs to also spend some time, attention, and energy in learning and understanding key tools of marketing like Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you an overview of your website traffic, user source, location, the amount of time they spend on your site, which campaign performs the best, and so on.
To make it easier, here are a few basic metrics that can help you understand how this most-sought-after tool works.
Acquisition Channels/Medium
This helps you know how each visitor landed on your website. The data from traffic sources lets you assess if your marketing strategy is bearing fruits. Site visitors usually come from these four channels-
Direct- people who find out about you through advertising, direct mails, or offline references and land on your site by typing your site URL on their search engine
Organic-people who search for your brand/business on search engines and reach your site or landing page through the generated results. This is where your SEO efforts will show results.
Referral-people who learn about your site from another webpage or source they are using, like a news site or an online directory.
Social- people visiting your site through your social media posts or ads on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
Users
This will tell you how many users have visited the site. Of all, how many are new users and how many are returning visitors?
Sessions
These are the number of times your site has been accessed by individual users. If the same user (stored IP address/user ID) has visited multiple times, Google Analytics reflects it as multiple sessions and not multiple users.
Bounce Rate
The most dreaded metrics, bounce rate measures the percentage of users who landed on your website but ‘bounced off’ without taking any action like filling forms, accessing other links. The desired bounce rate is 60% or less.
Conversions
Not to be confused with monetary transactions, conversions in Google Analytics mean taking actions on your site like filling a form, subscribing to e-mailers, requesting a quote etc.
A free website monitoring tool, Google Analytics helps you assess your current activities against the past campaigns and set future goals.