Ever wonder how many people are actually visiting your website? Well, that’s actually a pretty easy question to answer.
Google Analytics – a free tool – can tell you that and a whole lot more. That’s why we’re going to devote several nSite articles to giving you the basics of how to use Google Analytics to monitor your website’s performance and strategize your content creation.
In this article, we’re going start with the most basic steps toward reviewing your analytics: signing in and interpreting the Dashboard page.
Signing in to Google Analytics
If your website is powered by 3n1media, the Google Analytics tracking code is already in place for each of your pages. All you need to do is log into the CMS, click on
Google Analytics under the
Applications area on the left, and log in with a Google (Gmail) account linked to your website's analytics account. If you don’t already have a Gmail account linked to Google Analytics,
let us know, and we can get it set up for you.
Dashboard Basics
After you log in, the first report you see is your “Dashboard.” You’ll see right away that the Dashboard gives you lots of numbers in the Site Usage section. These numbers give you great information about your website’s performance over the last month, but they may not make sense if you’re not sure what they mean. So here’s a glossary for you:
- Visits: This is the overall number of times people have visited your website.
- Pageviews: This is the number of pages viewed on your website. A given visit may include more than one page view, as your website includes multiple pages.
- Pages/Visit: This is the average number of pages viewed during a single visit.
- Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visits to your website that were single-page visits. In other words, this percentage shows you how many people left your website after viewing only one page.
- Avg. Time on Site: This is the average amount of time that visitors spent on your site.
- % New Visits: This is the percentage of overall visits to your site that came from new users. If this percentage is 50%, half of the visitors coming to your site are new visitors (ones that haven’t been to your site before) and half are returning visitors (ones that have).
What does this data tell you? Well, generally, the more visits you’re getting, the better. If the pages/visit number is high, your visitors are probably engaged by your website enough to click around to different pages. If you have a high bounce rate, your visitors may not be engaged, since they’re leaving after visiting only one of your website’s pages. If you have a high percentage of new visits, your website is reaching new members of your audience. And so on.
Of course, this data is only the tip of the iceberg. In our next nSite article, we’ll talk about how you can use Google Analytics’ Content reports to determine what kinds of content are most interesting to your visitors.