Understanding Google Analytics

| SEO

Understanding Google Analytics

 

Every estate agent should monitor their websites performance; if you don’t then you may be wasting your time, money and effort pursuing the wrong marketing strategies. Measuring how well your website is performing is crucial to your online success. It can also help you understand where your website is failing or flawed, allowing you to correct the mistakes.

Google Analytics is a free tool that is very valuable to any website owner. It teaches you everything you need to know about how your website is performing.

Google Analytics delves very deep and covers a wide range of site performance factors, so this week we will cover the basics to help you understand and give you an idea of how your website is performing.

Google Analytics: Overview

The Audience Overview page will be the first page you land on once you log into Google Analytics, this covers the basics of how popular you website is. Here are the 7 factors you should be aware of under this section:

Sessions

This is the total number of individual visits to your website. Every time someone visits and leaves your website it will be counted as one session. It doesn’t matter if it is the same person returning, it will still be classed as multiple sessions.

Users

This shows you how many people have visited your website. This is important because everyone that visits your website is a potential lead. If your Sessions and Users are about the same, it means your visitors aren’t coming back to your website multiple times. A good sign is if you have a higher number of Sessions than Users.

Pageviews

This shows you how many individual pages have been visited. If a single visitor viewed 5 pages, it would increase your Pageviews by 5.

Pages/Session

This shows you the average amount of pages viewed per user. The more pages viewed per visit the better as it would mean your users are actually reading through your website.

Avg. Session Duration

This metric shows us how long each user stayed on the website per visit. The metric is handy as it gives us an indication of how engaged your audience is with your content. If your average session duration is low then you know something isn’t working.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate shows the percentage of people who left your website without viewing any of your other webpages. If your bounce rate is very high, you should try to add a call-to-action to the page to try and lead your users to another page, keeping them on your website long.

Try to make it easy for people to click from one page to the next; this will reduce the bounce rate and increase Pageviews and Average Session Duration.

% New Sessions

This shows you the percentage of people who are visiting your website for the first time. This will help you to see if your marketing campaigns are working as a high percentage will mean your reach is expanding. If the percentage is low, you may want to think about changing your marketing strategies.

 

These metrics will give you an idea of how well your website is performing, however it really is only scratching the surface of Google Analytics. Over the next few weeks we will delve deeper into Google Analytics, helping you to understand all the crucial metrics to ensure your website is performing to its full potential. 

Luke Stanley