Internet Marketing 101: How to read Google Analytics?

When I first started this series on Internet Marketing 101, I told you how to set up Google Analytics on your site.  Now let’s see what Google Analytics can really tell you about your site?

Google Analytics Dashboard

I don’t have a whole month’s worth of data on my friend’s site, www.veinskincareinstitute.com, but I do have enough to teach you guys how to read the data and what I would consider important.

Let’s log into our account and see what the site is up to.

First, we see the Dashboard.

Here we can find several things quickly. We see our mountain range of user activity. Looks like on average we get about 30 users a day visiting the site with 579 Visits.

Now these are not 30 different people. If you want to know Absolute Unique Visitors, then click on Visitors on the left side navigation. You’ll see there were 552 absolutes. But even that is questionable because the same person could use different computers (or IPs) so don’t hold these numbers as exact. Just know that you were seen about 30 times a day.

Back on the Dashboard, we see about 1704 Pageviews or about 3 pages visited per visitor.

Then the numbers on the right side, there is a Bounce Rate of 50.95%. This is very important. About 50% people that land on the site, don’t dig any deeper. They don’t take the next step. I would like to see this number lower since we don’t drive them off the site with any links (like to an external blog or other sites like a directory might).

These people also spend about 1.48 seconds on the site. So you could take this as something like they move pretty quickly while they are on the site (average of a little less than 50 seconds a page). Average Time on Site can be misconstrued as well because people have the ability to open new tabs on a browser and leave a site up; even though, they are no longer interested.

New visits are at 95%. That’s really high but that also can be mistaken because we just put analytics on the site. So I’m not really concerned about that number.

Let’s drop down on the Dashboard.

You’ve got the Absolute Visitor report in the Visitors Overview.

Next to it, you’ve got a Map Overlay. The US and Canada are the strongest. Since we aren’t really trying to reach into foreign areas then it is working fine.

Traffic Sources Overview is very important. Right now, it shows Search Engines as our High Point. 74.09%. That’s good but we are also running an Adwords campaign right now. Now I don’t have the list of keywords but this 75% makes sense when you are running one and not doing a lot of outside advertising directing people to your URL.

So let’s click “view report” to see what is going on at a deeper level.

Google Analytics Referrals

I’m very interested in where the referrals are coming from.

Google is first with 344 and then we get a direct/none (that means someone typed our name directly into the browers – but it’s about three times as less).

Yahoo is second, then we get down to MSN and the much, much smaller referrals. OK, the adwords campaign is probably working.

NOTE: If you are running Adwords, make sure it is synced up with Google Analytics. Then you can track it more effectively by campaigns and goals. Very efficient.

Notice, how little yellowpages.com/referral is. I would make sure that matches up with the referrals they say they are sending to you if you are buying space from them.

You can also see how many pages they visit, average time on site, percentage of new visits, and bounce rate. All good stuff.

Notice that Yahoo users spend more time but they are also much fewer vists so you can’t just say Yahoo people are more engaged – there’s a lot less of them and that can really mess with the statistics.

The other cool thing here is keywords.  We get to see the keywords that people are putting in and then finding your site.  Are they the keywords you want people to find you with or is there an opportunity to exploit what they are putting in and finding you?

The interesting thing here is tattoo removal st. louis is driving traffic to us.  I didn’t expect that and it’s good to know.  Plus we aren’t paying for the keyword and we are first on SERP for that search.

Google Analytics Keywords

Let’s go back to the Dashboard.

Last but definitely not least is Content Overview.

Click in and go to the full report.

Here we can see that the homepage is where most people entered the site or at least seen the homepage (Top Landing Pages link can confirm this). But notice that before_after_pictures gets a lot of users as well. But as you go across you can see how much time they spend and where they go afterward.

Google Analytics Content

There’s a lot more that you can do in Google Analytics. I really like the Site Overlays, Top Landing Pages, Top Exit, Top Content. It’s great.

We’ll take all of this into account when we make recommendations on how to change the site up so we can convert more people.