Day 1: What To Look For In Google Analytics
14 April 2010
It only makes sense to measure the activity on your website, but what statistics really matter? The following is our list of what to look for in Google Analytics.
As we might have expected, none of our 10-Day Makeover participants were actively using website analytics to make decisions or improvements for their websites. If you are trying to improve your website, here are a few things to look for:
Traffic Sources Pie Chart - This chart (which appears on the default dashboard of Google Analytics) should match up with your marketing efforts. Are you working on improving search engine traffic, requesting back links from referring sites, or sending out campaigns that link directly to your website? If the chart does not match your efforts, you may need to find out what is happening. The average site will show healthy traffic from all three sources.
Unique Visitor Trend - If your site has been up for a while, adjust the time period of the report, so you can see at least 6 months. Ingore the outliers (big peaks or valleys) and look for the overall trend. Is your traffic getting better? If not, check first for anything seasonal influences that might be affecting traffic. The important thing is to decide if it is getting better or worse and then to act accordingly.
The graph above is for a new website. Traffic can vary wildly as things get started. Even with only a month to consider, you can see traffic is generally improving. If you don't get better in the next month, something might be wrong.
Keywords - When you read the list of keywords that people have used to find your site, note how many people are searching on your name. A high number of name searches shows a strong brand, but weak SEO. You will know that your SEO is working if the report contains many different keywords describing your products. If these keywords are not listed, the problem may be that your site is missing this content. It could also signal a poorly designed website that is actually preventing the crawler from indexing your pages.
Landing Pages - Your homepage may always be your most popular entrance to your site, but look at the other top landing pages. What are people interested in? The answer may cause you to add more content around a popular topics or remove content that draws in the wrong crowd.
TIP: It is possible with Google Analytics to remove your computer from the statistics. This process requires that you to load a cookie on your machine. The operation is not hard for an experienced webmaster. Another solution is to look only at Absolute Unique Visitors, which would count you only once in the given time frame.
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