The goal of your website is to build a solid and loyal customer base. To do this, you have to be able to track certain analytic metrics from Google. These will help you quickly and easily identify any problems and track how well your website converts new customers. There are dozens of analytic metrics to choose from. We’ve rounded up the most important ones.
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- User Conversion for New and Returning Guests
It’s very important to know how a first-time user to your site will interact with it and how a new user will differ from a returning user. This will help you improve the experience of the first-time visitors and hopefully convert them faster. If you have a low conversion rate for new users, you can assume that your website may not be very user-friendly. When you know this, you can correct it.
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- Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate refers to any visitor that clicks on your site and leaves without browsing, buying or completing any tasks.
To Google a high bounce rate indicates a low-quality web page but in reality, this can be far from true.
Take the homepage of a website, for example, its primary function is to convey a message and direct the user to what they are searching for, so one would expect a lower bounce rate. Whereas an article which satisfies the user’s expectation can result in a high bounce rate. Why you might be asking? If the user has had their question answered they are much less likely to browse another page.
Therefore, any analysis which involves bounce rate should be completed on a page by page basis.
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- Mobile Performance
Google wants to know how well your site performs for mobile users since mobile users now exceed desktop users with 52.36% of users on mobile and 43.8% of users on a desktop. Your site should quickly resize to suit different size screens with no or minimal lag. It should also be easy to maneuver since most mobile users use their fingers to click around websites.
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- Traffic Sources
Are people actually clicking on your ads or are they typing your website’s URL into the address bar? Is your SEO strategy working and generating views? There are three broad categories that you want to track to understand your traffic sources. They include:
Direct Visitors (Cost-per-Click) – People who landed on your page by typing your site’s URL into their address bars or clicking on one of your ads.
Referral Visitors – People came to your site because they saw it mentioned somewhere like another blog.
Organic Search Visitors – People who entered search terms that are relevant to your website and clicked on your site from the search.
These four essential analytic metrics for Google can help you streamline your website and optimise your visitors’ experience. In turn, your website can experience a boost in Google’s rankings, and more visitors will convert.
