Essential metrics in Google Analytics
If you have a digital business, it is essential that you understand how the users who visit your website behave, the traffic you have, the quality of the visits, etc.; and one of the most reliable tools to do it is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics generates reports that track important metrics with which you can identify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of your site. It is recommended that you evaluate and compare them weekly regardless of the industry you are in, so you can measure if the changes you are implementing are giving results .
Below we share 5 basic metrics that you do or do have to monitor, since they are the ones with which you can evaluate if the traffic to your site is of quality or not:
users
Analytics distinguishes between two types of users, new ones (who have never entered your site) and recurring ones (those who already know you). This tracking is done through cookies, it considers that this measurement is not 100% accurate, if a user uses different devices or browsers or rejects cookies, they could count as separate users.
sessions
The sessions are different from the users, a single user can visit the site several times, for example, if a user sees your ad on Facebook , they go to your page, check what your products or services are, close the window and then go an ad to Google and comes back in, it's generating two sessions.
Pages per session
Pages per session is the number of pages visited by a user in each session. If you see that the pages per session are high, you could conclude that users are highly interested in seeing more of your products or services; that is, they are browsing your site and not simply viewing the page to which you direct them.
Average session duration
As the name suggests, this metric averages the time users spend on your website. Here it is worth evaluating how much time you consider it necessary to read or view all the information on your landing page.
If you estimate that it is 30 seconds and the average duration of the sessions is 5 seconds, it means that users are not staying to see everything you want to show them, so you should make adjustments to make your page more attractive and generate content of higher value.
Bounce Rate
This is one of the most important and interesting metrics that Analytics provides. The bounce rate indicates how many users are entering the site and leaving without generating any type of action, literally "bounced".
Depending on each website there are "good" or "bad" percentages; If the page you're directing to is intended to get the user to learn more, sign up, or buy, you might consider a 70% bounce rate "bad." This means that there are many areas for improvement or that the traffic you are getting is not of good quality, as it is not interested in interacting.
You can access all these metrics in the Audience > Summary section and all you need is to create an account and connect your site through a plugin, or in more advanced cases, inserting into your site's code or using Google Tag Manager.
Remember that these metrics have to be interpreted together to reach solid conclusions that allow you to make improvements to your site, find out the quality of visits, the performance of your campaigns and, in more advanced cases, identify conversion paths and the funnel of your business.