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Interpreting Google Site Analytics 1 – Google Analytics Dashboard

When your website is at a 99% launch ready mode, the analytic tool that you must add to your website is Google site analytics.

What does it do?

Google site analytics is the most popular and convenient web analytic tool around the globe. Not only is it a free tool but the most powerful tool for your Seo and web marketing efforts. You can view the site directly here.

Web analytics is a tool that displays a websites visits, statistics and performance rates daily. The data thats available for you is organized into :

 

 

1 . Dashboard – this is the interface that gives you a summary of the most important data for your websites daily performance.

From top to bottom :

Visits - 

This is the most exciting part where you go in and see how your website is fairing in terms of visits and hits. Apparently, for the purpose of this demonstration, I used a website thats not doing well at all.  Its got a maximum of 4 visits per day in the last two weeks. its a fairly new website and I have taken up the responsibility to optimize this website. No work has begun yet! There`s a lot of work in store for me here.

The display area shows you highs and lows in graphic form which is easily interpreted.

 

Site Usage : 

From the users point of view, the site usage area quickly runs up a cumulative report on :

Visits – Total visits in the period specified. In this demo, we have chosen a 2 week span. The visit stat reveals to me that 46 people visited this site in the last 14 days.

Pageviews – The 46 visits yielded 97 page views. This data immediately tells me that there were a few people who read a couple of pages and thats a great thing! Now, it may have been our web design team since its a brand spanking new website.

Pages / visits – Per visit sessions, visitors usually go to about 2.11 pages within this website. This site has over 120 pages and so this information isn’t good at all.

Bounce rates – This is a very important piece of data that interprets the usefulness of your website, your targeted customers, the content of the website and an shows the overall evaluation of your website or blogs relevance to the visitor.

A bounce occurs when a visitor who lands into your website or blog; doesn’t find it appealing or comes to your website, realizes its not what they want and immediately clicks the go back button in the web browser to where they clicked from.

A bounce rate of more than 50% is generally accepted to be bad. 40% bounce rates are better but for my own goal, I like to keep them snug in around 30-40%. If you get a 0% bounce rate, you may be quite the genius or perhaps you have a site that nobody goes to. Its got to be one of the two!

Average time on site – This information tells us how much time someone spends in the website. Generally more time spent by the visitor =good content=sales.

The average time on site is ideal when its above 4 mins minimum in my own experience. There are some where the average time can be from 12 – 15 minutes. These sites have great dynamic content. Usually a good trick here is to setup videos in some pages especially the home page.

Unique Visits or new visits – This piece tells how how many visitors are coming to the site for the first time. In the image screen shot above, 91.30% are new visitors and the rest 8.7% are old visitors.  This is not good at all since we want new visits and we also need old visits. New visits bring in new customers, old visitors however buy stuff from the website .. there must be a good balance between the two. Currently this website has no loyalty whatsoever.

 

Map Overlay -  toward the right

This interprets the reach of the website on a global scale. Currently, The Philippines has brought the highest number of visits, there were some from north america, the US and Canada. A few from Russia and some from Australia. The denser shade of green means higher visit statistics. Thats perfectly acceptable since this is a brand new website and we have been testing some things around the website for a while and we are based in beautiful Philippines. In 2 months we will see that visit statistic move to North america more than any other geographic area.

 

Traffic sources overview – bottom Left

Websites get visits from direct URL inputs in web browsers, from Search Engine searches and from other websites around the world.

Direct URL input is called direct traffic if someone types in the “www.mywebsite.com” in the web browser in chrome, Firefox, IE or safari etc..

SE traffic is search engines traffic including google, yahoo, bing, ask, dogpile etc

Referral sites are websites that refer a visit to us. Usually these websites are ads and classifieds websites, bookmarking sites, social media sites, pr releases , links embedded in emails and backlinking directories.

 

This article only dealt with interpreting the first interface that opens up when you have applied for google anaytics. Google site analytics is a loved tool by many including myself and I highly recommend it. In my next few blogs, I will discuss how to copy and paste the Google analytic code into your website, how to apply for a google analytics account and how to interpret more data in depth and make decisions for your online business.