Google Analytics 101: Which Metrics to Look For and Why

Google Analytics is one of the best platforms to use to track your website’s performance. You can gather metrics on who visits your site, from where, and what they are doing. Most importantly, you can track leads and sales so that you can ultimately understand what makes your B2B website profitable. However, if you have ever been in Google Analytics I am sure it quickly became overwhelming due to the amount of data presented to you. What does the data mean? What is most important? These are common questions that arise to new users. Below are the most important sections I look at when making online marketing decisions in Google Analytics.

Audience

The audience section of Google Analytics gives metrics on who is visiting your website and some overall metrics on what visitors are doing on your website. Some quality metrics to look for are:

• Sessions: The amount of visits coming to your website. 
• Pages/Session: The average amount of pages viewed per session. This tells you how often visitors are browsing your website.
• Avg. Session Duration: The average amount of time spent on the site. This informs you on how much time visitors are spending.
• Bounce Rate: What percentage of visitors only viewed one page and then left.

Under this section, there are drop downs for additional audience info. Under Behavior, you can view how many visitors are new visitors versus returning visitors, which can give you insights into how many people have never been to your site before and how many are repeat visitors.

Lastly, the Geographic drop down shows data of where visitors are located so you can better understand what the other metrics mean. For example, if you see a lot of visitors are coming from outside the US and you only sell nationally, you may want to filter out those other regions so that you can get a more accurate understanding of your target audience.

Acquisition

One of my favorite sections of Google Analytics is the All Traffic > Channels section. This shows you all the sources from which visitors are coming from: organic, paid, direct, referral, social, email, etc. Also, from each individual source you can view the quality metrics discussed in the previous section, to see how each traffic source is truly performing against one another. For example, you can see whether most visitors are finding you through search engines versus paid search. This can help you determine where your b2b online marketing strategy needs focus and improvement.

Lastly, the Social drop down in this section gives you insights into how your social media platforms are performing, specifically how much traffic is coming from each and which are converting.

Behavior

The Site Content drop down in this section gives you more detailed information on what visitors are doing on your site.  Specially, All Pages shows you what pages on your site are getting the most and least visits. This can help you determine marketing tactics, such as what pages you need to optimize further with SEO.

Within this section you can also review the performance specific content on your site by using the filter. For example, if you wrote a new article and posted it your site, take a look at how many visitors are viewing it, how long they spent reading it, and if they take another action on your site. This can help you determine how to structure and improve your next article.

Conversions

This section is probably the most important section of Google Analytics because this is where you can see how profitable your website is; whether it is tracking actual revenue and spend, or goals such as form submissions.

1. Goals > Overview: This section tells you overall how many conversions your website is getting, what each of those conversions are and the goal conversion rate.
2. Ecommerce > Overview: If you have an ecommerce website you can track how many transactions your website is getting, revenue, conversion rate, etc.
3. Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions: This section gives you analytics on what sources ended in assisted conversions, which can further give you insights into how those channels are performing against one another.

Google Analytics Can Transform Your B2B Online Marketing Strategy

Google Analytics has endless metrics and tracking, and when you know where to look and what analytics to look for, you can transform your marketing strategy and website into a profitable online marketing machine.

Learn more about SVM’s B2B online marketing services and/or schedule a free website analysis to get a better understanding of what is working and not working on your site.