The Top 10 Google Stats You Should Be Measuring
One of the most important tasks of a website owner is to measure their website’s success. How do you do this? The answer of course lies in data. Not only the raw data, but how it is analyzed makes a huge difference. Google Analytics is one of those coveted tools that collects a whole range of data and splits it into segments for your convenience. But are some of the Google stats more meaningful to your business than others? We’ve rounded up the top 10 Google stats we feel you cannot be without:
- Browser Compatibility
This could be considered to be quite obvious, yet this is crucial for checking if you are losing significant traffic due to your website not being compatible on all browsers. You should check your Google stats relating to the individual browsers as well as devices: desktop, mobile and tablet.
- Behavior Flow
This set of data gives you an insight into how your users tend to navigate your website. It provides the points of entry, which you can custom filter. For example, you can view all the traffic from Social Media channels, split by the various platforms. You can then see which pages on your website they start with, and where they navigate to from there. You will see trends as to which pages are most popular, how many pages the users visit, and where they abandon the site. You can examine these behavior flow Google stats for acquisition, advertising, behavior, custom variables, social and users.
- Traffic Channels
These Google stats give you a list of default channel grouping – in other words, a list of where your traffic comes from: social, direct, paid search and organic search. This is very useful as it provides insight into which promotions are working for your type of content, how many users are aware of your website through direct traffic stats, how any campaigns you are running are performing, and the highly coveted organic traffic.
- Site Content: All Pages
Here you will find all the Google stats you need to analyze your individual website pages. The metrics include: pageviews, unique page views, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, exit and page value. Let’s take your home page as an example. You can see how many users viewed your home page, how many of the views are from unique users, how long they spend on your page on average, how many times users entered your page, how many users leave your site after viewing only one page, and how many exit your home page.
- Content Drilldown
This section further narrows down the site content with respect to the best performing pages. This is more relevant to large websites.
- Landing Pages
These pages are the ones through which visitors enter your website. These Google stats give you insight into which pages are the gates for your users to find you and how you can improve.
- Exit Pages
These are the opposite of your landing pages: these stats indicate where your users decide to leave your site, and at what percentage levels.
- Site Speed
This is one of the most important Google stats to keep an eye on. Slow loading pages are a big no no; most of us don’t have the patience to wait for more than a few seconds for a website to load. Even more important is that Google uses loading times to rank websites in searches. The great thing about this function is that Google Analytics breaks the timings down by page.
- Page Speed Tools
This is a truly informative and practical tool which analyzes your pages and gives you a list of suggestions as to how to make your site even better and faster! It also lists all of the positive features your page passes on their test.
- Audience Demographics
Last but not least is perhaps the most basic metric, yet more important than you might assume. Knowing in which geographic locations users are located and in which language users are browsing are Google stats which are crucial to any business. These stats inform you whether you are on the right track or completely lost. If you’re building a local business, these numbers will help you out enormously, as you can also view stats by city.