Google Analytics - Understanding the basics

When 'Base One Search' launches SEO campaigns we usually configure Google Analytics (GA) accounts in order to provide more detailed reports, and for client to be able to view the information themselves.  However, as user-friendly as Google Analytics seems to us, some of our clients feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information and reports it generates. Getting started with GA can be somewhat knotty.  In this first article, we uncover some of the most useful functionalities of GA.

The Dashboard

Once logged-in with your ID and password you'll see the dashboard which contains snapshots of several reports generated by Google Analytics (GA).



The Site Usage contains the following:

• Visits: The number of visits to our site during a given time period and this is the most basic parameter for any website owner.  Note this number includes new visitors and returning visitors.  So, a site that receives 20 visits in a day may be from four people, who each go to the website 5 times that day.  

By default Google shows the last 30 days of activity (number of visits), however this default setting is customable and allow us to view figures for a specific period and even compare two different date ranges.

• Unique Visitors: This represents the number of un-duplicated visitors that have visited the website for a given period. This means that visitors were counted only once, even if they may have visited the website several times in a given period.

• Pageviews: is the total number of pages all visitors viewed on the site for a given period.

• Unique Pageviews: can be seen in the Top Content report. It is the aggregation of pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session.  A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

• Pages/Visit: The average number of pages viewed by each visitor.  A high Average Pageviews number may suggest that visitors interacted lengthily on the website, this can be the result of appropriate targeted traffic or good content (of high interest) on the website. However, this is not always a good thing because it may also mean visitors could not easily locate the information they wanted to find.  It is important to ensure that web pages are designed with good web-usability principles. 
  

• Bounce Rate: is the percent of traffic that viewed the landing page without visiting any other pages on the website.  A High bounce rate is a double edged sword because it may be caused by poor website usability, poor call-to-actions on the landing page or simply because users are landing on your page and not finding what they were looking for.  But it may also be a result of a high quality landing page, that provides exactly what the user is looking for, hence the user doesn't need to cruse on to other pages.

 

• Average Time on Site: This one is pretty self explanatory.  It is believed that if visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting more extensively with it. However, this theory can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open while they may not be actually visiting the website.

• Percentage of New Visits: the percentage of how many computers went to the website for the first time, which Google tracks by IP address.  A high percentage of new visitors can indicate that the website is doing well at driving fresh traffic while a high percentage of returning visitors suggests that the content of the website is appealing enough to keep visitors coming back.

Traffic Sources
Understanding where your visitors come from is essential. GA shows us figures of where our traffic comes from together with a pie chart.

                          Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

• Referring Sites - shows the number of other websites that have links that brought visitors to the site.

• Direct Traffic - The number of visitors who directly accessed your site by typing the URL directly in their browsers or via bookmarks.

• Search Engines - the amount of traffic coming from user search queries on search engines, includes both organic clicks and PPC clicks.

There are several factors that affect those figures, it can depend on the nature of your website, the power of your brand and how much effort you put into optimising your site. For example, a newly launched website normally have a higher number of direct traffic or referring sites, but over time as the page contents are indexed by the search engines and with more SEO effort, traffic will shift more to search engines.

• Top Traffic Sources: This is an excellent tool to analyse where exactly most of your traffic comes from.  The report provides a deeper insight into the traffic sources of your website. It separates 'Organic traffic' to 'Paid traffic' (PPC) as well as details on exact referring sites.  By default GA shows top five results but you can see the full report anytime by clicking "view full report".

• Top Keywords: Give a list of the most popular keywords together with their number of visits.  The report grows with more and more results and figures when you have more and more web-pages that are indexed by the search-engine.  Sometimes you don't see your targeted keywords in the table, this is quite normal when a website is new, in this case you are most likely to see long-tail (mainly descriptive) keywords.  It can take a while to rank for targeted keywords, however with consistent SEO effort you'll soon see your targeted keywords ranking well.

• Map Overlay:The Map Overlay in Google Analytics allows you to have a geographical view of where your visitors are accessing your website.  Geotargeting is helpful in a lot of industries, including travel websites when we want to know where our target audiences are coming from.  It also helps us spread out PPC budgets across relevant nations, and tell us what other languages may bring in more traffic.

By default GA gives you a view of the world map with varying shades of green. The darker the green, the greater number of visitors from that particular section or place.