Google Analytics Simplified

Ok, so you may or may not have heard about Google Analytics   or as the cool kids like to call it “GA”.  So what is it? Basically,  GA is a tool that tracks and reports user activity on your website.  It tells you where users came from, what pages they clicked on, how long they stayed, and a bunch of other stuff you might be interested in.

So why is this important to you?

Well, if you own a website or manage one, this kind of data can help you figure out which pages are getting visitor love and which are not. As a strategy, you can leverage your most popular pages and use them to promote new services, products, or promotions. Or, maybe you want to focus your energy on improving the pages that are getting little to no attention.  If you choose the latter, you may want add a catchier title, more interesting picture(s), or simply update your content. What ever you decide to do, the focus should be to create a better and richer experience for your visitors.

OK, so how does the magic happen?

The basics are these…Google gives us, Sitenetic, a snippet of code to place on your website. This little snippet of code connects to your Google Analytics account. Yes, if you’re a Sitenetic customer, you have a Google Analytics account. If you didn’t, we would suck at our job. But, we don’t and therefore you do. When someone visits your website, they trigger the snippet of code and GA goes to work. It analyzes where the visitor came from (for example Facebook), it uses some techie junk to figure out their geographic location, and starts to track things like how long they stayed on a particular page, what they clicked on, etc. At the end, it compiles all the data it collected and stores it. Eventually this data is aggregated to create a report for you.

Sample Report

So, this is what a simple report looks like. Trust me these things can get pretty complicated really quick. But, for our purpose, we’ll use these simple data points, which I’ll describe below:

Sessions – A session represents a visitor coming to your site and clicking around during a specific period of time. For example, they checked out your home page, read an article on your site, checked out your team page, etc.

Users – A User represents a unique visitor checking out your site. So, you can visit www.sitenetic.com twenty times, but GA will only count one of those twenty times as a unique visit. In this case, this site had 15 unique visitors.

Page Views – It really is how many time someone views a page. When a visitor hits the back button, a pageview is recorded. When a visitor hits refresh, a pageview is recorded.

Bounce Rate – This percentage tells us how many people visited a page on your site, didn’t click on anything, and left. They just BOUNCED!  This may be because they found what they were looking for or din’t find your site helpful.

Organic Search – This number represents visitors that found you via a search on the web. Remember, visitors can get to your site through social media links, typing your domain “siteentic.com” in the address bar, referral links, etc.

Pages/Sessions – This number represents the average pages per session a user interacted with (Page Views / Sessions)

Don’t worry if you’re either bored or overwhelmed. At the end, we take care of all this stuff for you anyway, but it’s always good to have a little understanding of some of the tools we use to keep your site active and growing. Don’t forget to contact us if you have any questions about this article or you’d like to learn more about our services.  See you next time.