One thing we come across is people having trouble understanding Google website analytics. These are the set of statistics used in Google Analytics that present everyone who uses them with a wealth of information. We hope to give you a good idea on the basics of using Google’s website analytics so you can begin to make heads or tails out of all the numbers Google is giving you about your website. However, before you look at Google’s website analytics, let’s put them in a frame of reference for your website.

Every website is different. Some are all about information and they use Ads to monetize their blogs or news. Other people sell stuff online. Some people set up sites that simply redirect to other sites. What you need to understand before you even look at the analytics is your goal for your website. To help with this we have come up with a few questions.

Does your website:

• Sell anything directly?
• Ask people to contact you to discuss business?
• Run ads?
• Ask for emails or social media follows?

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, than that is a goal of the website.

Some early stats explained in Google website analytics:

When you log in you are presented with a Dashboard that give you a comprehensive view of your website. In the upper right hand corner is the date for the dashboard and will default to the last 30 days starting from yesterday. You can change this by clicking on it and selecting the dates you want to see, but a 30 day view is usually pretty good.

The analytics are as follows:

• Visits. This is how many times someone accessed your website.
• Page views. How many times a page was viewed. So if one visit by one person resulted in them looking at 8 pages, then they racked up 8 page views
• Avg. Page views. This is the average number of page views that each visit creates. The number can be low or high. If you have a site with 4 pages and your avg. page view is 3, then you are doing really well. If you have a website with 1,000 pages and you have 3 page views, then you aren’t doing so hot.
• Bounce Rate. This stat always confuses people. This is the rate at which someone arrives at your website and won’t go beyond the page they landed on. They either “bounce” or go back to their previous page or close the browser window.
• Avg. Time on Site. This is the average amount of time someone spends on your website. This can be anywhere from a few minutes to close to 20 min. For eCommerce stores, a high time on site means people are browsing the store which is good. For referral sites, you might want a low time so people are moving on
• New Visits. Out of total traffic, this is the amount of people who have come to your site for the first time. This can be good in the beginning when you launch a site, but bad later if you are trying to get repeat business.
• Visitors. Unlike visits, this is the actual number of unique people who have come to your site and is always number than visits as one person can visit more than once.
• Map Overlay. This is where everyone is coming from in the world You can see down to the city level.
• Traffic Sources. This will describe where your traffic is coming from and usually consists of 3 sources: Direct – they entered in your URL. Search Engine – They searched on Google or Bing and clicked on your link. Referral – They clicked on a link on another website and came to you.
• Content. Which 5 pages are your most popular

Those are the stats from the Google website analytics dashboard. Additionally, they should give you a fairly good idea about what each of them means. All of the stats are clickable and will take you down into each statistic. Moreover, we encourage you to explore each stat to get a better idea what people are looking at and why they might be leaving your site.