Google Analytics 101 (Part 3)

In this installment of Analytics 101, we'll dive straight into some statistics that you can use right away. Hopefully by now you've finished installing your tracking code and have had some visitor traffic you can look at.

When you sign in to Google Analytics and view your reports, you'll be taken straight to the Dashboard, which is a top-level view of your site so that you can see how you're doing at a glance.

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It's important to make sure you always have the date range you want selected. Use the Date Selector in the top right to choose your range with either the Calendar or Timeline view.

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The large graph shows your Visits over time by default. If you click on the drop-down near the top right of the graph, you can make it expand to select any one of six important statistics for your site: Visits, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and % New Visits.

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You might also notice that these same six statistics appear in the Site Usage section under the graph. You can learn how Google Analytics defines the basic terms of Visits, Pageviews, and Pages/Visit from this Help Center article; to be consistent, make sure everyone who'll be using your reports understands them.

The latter three stats are where it really gets interesting. Each of them will provide unique insights into your traffic based on context that only you, the person who best understands your website, can provide.

• Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who left your site after only seeing one page. For most sites, a high Bounce Rate is bad since people are arriving, taking a quick look around, and leaving immediately. Either the site isn't useful or they're turned off by something. By monitoring your Bounce Rate over time, you can optimize your landing pages and then check to see if your changes worked - a lower rate means people like what you've done with the place. Bounce Rate is best used to compare different sets of your own data. Websites and industries vary too greatly for us to give you here a set number on what a healthy Bounce Rate is. For example, blogs usually have high Bounce Rates no matter what since normal visitor behavior is to read the newest post and then leave.
  

• Average Time on Site indicates the average length of time a visitor spends on your site's tracked pages. A high number may mean that visitors are very engaged with your site, which is great if, say, your goal is to provide entertaining content. However, you may not necessarily want it high. If you have an e-commerce site and people spend a long time on it, perhaps your buying process is too long or confusing. Once you find out which way is best for you, you can take steps to change your Average Time on Site number in the desired direction.
  

• % New Visits tells you the percentage of visitors that have never visited your site before. If you look at a date range where you've run a far-reaching ad campaign, you'd be excited to see an increased number of new visitors who have been exposed to your campaigns and are curious to see your website. Or perhaps your goal is to create loyalty among your customer base, in which case you'd want a significant portion of your visitors to be returning. Because % New Visits is a statistic that usually needs more context and absolute numbers to be useful, go ahead and click on the link to see a detailed report for it. You can do the same for any of the statistics we've discussed. In fact, you can pretty much click on any stat in the Google Analytics interface to drill down for more details.
  

We've just covered the first set of metrics that you can use to measure the performance of your site, as well as the success of any changes you happen to make to it, and we didn't even have to leave the comfort of the Dashboard. Next time, we'll look at another set of useful data, your Traffic Sources reports.

Posted by Christian, Inside AdWords crew