The building blocks of any Analytics report are the metrics and the dimensions. Analyzing the right metrics and dimensions of the report at the right time will help you take effective business decisions and reach your goals within the specific time frame.
Each row of a report represents a dimension and column represents a metric. A dimension is an attribute of a visitor who lands on your website and metric is a number used to measure one of the characteristics of a dimension.
All these characteristics of dimensions are labeled as metrics. They are categorized into two groups: Pre-defined metrics (the ones that are already available in Google Analytics) and custom metrics (the ones defined by the user). Both these metrics can be used as Primary and Secondary metrics.
In Analytics, metrics are calculated in two basic ways- As overview totals and in association with one or more reporting dimensions.
Here are the most important Google Analytics metrics using which you can use to have a clear understanding of your business and get useful insights.
1. Users
A user in Google Analytics is defined as a visit from a browser with a cookie containing a unique id number. A user is the number of new and returning people who visit your site during a set period of time.
It helps to understand the way in which a returning visitor interacts with your website and how will it be different from a first-time visitor who interacts with your website.
With this metric, you can analyze how each type of user behaves and how new users convert to returning users.
It also gives an overview of how users interact differently between industries— acquiring new users may be more important than having a large number of returning user for some companies, but the same thing may not be a good option for you.
2. Bounce rate
It is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves or bounces back from your website or the landing page without browsing any further.
Bounce rate of a page= Total number of bounces on a page / Total number of entrances on the page.
Google analytics calculates and reports the bounce rate of a web page or the entire website.
E-commerce website sometimes refers to bounce rate as abandonment rates too.
Having a high bounce rate is an indication of several things like
- Slow page load times. People don’t wait for more than 4 seconds for a site to load.
- Bombarding visitors with alternative offers and intrusive advertisements
- Filling your landing with poor grammar and spelling mistakes.
- Production of low-quality content
- Pretending mobile devices don’t exist and everyone is always at their desktop.
3. Page views
A pageview, also known as pageview hit or page tracking hit is an instance of a page being loaded and reloaded in a browser.
Another type of pageview is unique pageview which is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once.
A unique pageview is counted for each page URL + page title combination.
When there are a high number of page views, it could be due to the quality of the content on the website. On the other hand, it means that the visitors are not able to find what they are looking for, so they keep navigating around different pages or try to reload pages that are not showing up correctly.
4. Sessions
A session is a group of interactions recorded by the user in a given time period.
By analyzing session data in real-time, you get to know what exactly are the users doing on your website, what you can do to get them to do more of it, and how you will be able to influence their behavior into conversions.
Interactions comprise of browsing the pages, downloading resources, purchasing products, liking or commenting, writing reviews, etc.
Each of this interaction is important and helps you to reach your end goal effectively.
By tracking these interactions in the GA report, you will be able to determine how the visitor chooses to travel through the website through different content.
5. Average Session Duration
The Average Session duration is the average length (in seconds, minutes or hours) of a Google Analytics session in a particular time period.
Avg. session duration=Total duration of all GA sessions (in seconds) in a particular time period / Total number of GA sessions in the same time period.
The average session duration for direct traffic is 1 minute and 50 seconds.
It is directly proportional to the relevancy of your website to the user. The more relevant the user finds your website, the more time he spends on it.
When the interactions per visit are low and the duration of the average session is high, it is an indication that either the web page has too much information or the information is confusing to the visitor which is forcing him to stay longer on the page.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, there are multiple other metrics that can be used or you can customize some according to your needs. But with a clear understanding of these basic metrics, you can further integrate them with dimensions or solely use them.
Once you are aware of the metrics that are most important, you can better utilize Google Analytics to track the progress of your website’s own metrics.
As each of the metrics has a direct effect on one another, when you make the choice to optimize one, you are taking action to optimize multiples.
