Depending on who you are or what type of business you’re running will depend on which metrics concern you in Google Analytics. As an SEO agency, you’re responsible for monitoring analytics for multiple clients. Most times, you will be watching different areas for different clients.
There are a few basics that are important for website owners. Most people want to know how their website is being used, by who and what their visitors are looking at. There are a few different ways to measure those metrics.
Google Analytics always gives you a month’s worth of data, so depending on which time frame you want to study, set the data range to that. Below, I set my data to read the month of November.
Under the date range, Google gives you an overview of the important basic metrics you should be concerned about:
Each client is different, so explaining the data can be challenging because there’s no right or wrong answer. Depending on the business or the industry of the business, conversions can be different. Each of the above metrics should be important though.
- Visits represent the number of times people visited your website.
- Unique visitors = the number of unique visitors that landed on your website
- Page views = How many pages were viewed overall by the number of visitors
- Pages/Visit = How many pages (on average) were viewed per visit
- Average Time on Site = How much time the average user spent looking at your website
- Bounce Rate = 100% = user visited one page and exited (the lower the number, the better)
- % New Visits = How many visitors were new (have never been to your website)
You can get a good idea of the traffic coming to your website and what the visitors are looking at from these few facts. Each category can be broken down further into more detail, depending on which area is more important. A secondary area that SEO agencies find important is Traffic Sources. You can get an idea of how people are finding your website with this data and whether it’s through search engines, referrals or directly.
This graphic shows that 71.66% of all visits to this website in November were through search engines, using a variety of keywords.
Keep in mind, each industry is different and data can range depending on the business, but running reports monthly can help monitor progress.