Each month, you receive a “Google Analytics” report. If you are finding this difficult to understand, here are some tips to interpreting this information.
Dashboard Report: The Dashboard Report keeps track of the statistics of your site. This information is helpful for determining what may or may not be working within your site.
- Bounce Rate: This number refers to the percentage of users who leave your site or “bounce” from your site to the next, rather than staying to view other pages within your site.
- If the bounce rate is low, this is a good thing. This means that fewer users are leaving your site. It means that your content is useful and users are finding what they needed. It also means that your site is easily navigated. For example, if your bounce rate is 25%, this means that around 75% of your users are staying on your website enough to view more than one page.
- If the bounce rate is high, this is not so good. It means that users are not finding what they are looking for. It could mean that your content is either too sparse or too overwhelming. It could also mean that users are having a difficult time navigating the site. For example, if your bounce rate is 75%, then that means that only 25% of your users are staying for more than one page view.
- Page Views: This number refers to the amount of times the pages within your site are visited. If page views are going up, that means that you are getting more traffic to your site and the ways you are advertising your site are working. If they are going down, then that means that traffic is lessening.
- Referring Websites: This information is very helpful in determining where your users are coming from and how these other sites are affecting your page views. You can also interpret this information to help you figure out where you want to boost advertising potential. For example, if you have a Facebook page dedicated to your business and Facebook is low on the Referring Website list, you may want to come up with some creative ways to use Facebook, so that you can up your page views.
Keyword Report: This report tells you what the popular search terms for your website are.
- Direct Keywords: These are words that you have claimed as, or that you predicted would be good search terms for your website. They could also be in the titles of the individual pages within your site.
- Indirect Keywords: These are searches that used terminology that you didn’t predict. For example you may have “horses” denoted as a direct keyword in your website, but someone might have searched “equestrian services 28801” and arrived at your site, then spent a good deal of time on your site. This is helpful information because you can revise the text within your site to help capture more of these visitors.
Top Content: On this report you will generally want to look at the top 4-6 pages listed and make sure that all of those pages funnel traffic appropriately. You can also look at the average time spent on the particular page and compare that visually to what’s on that page. If the page has very little content, but a high average time, this is an indication that the content is confusing or hard to navigate. The opposite is true about pages with large amounts of content and short times. This means that the viewer is overwhelmed and doesn’t care to invest the time sorting through that amount of extra stuff.