This is part III of a five part series discussing Google Analytics. In this article I want to discuss visitors. Not just how many visitors came to the site. While that it is important, you need to be able to notice trends about what these visitors are doing. How many pages are they viewing on average? How long are they staying on the site? What is your website bounce rate? These are all terms, and statistics, that you need to be aware of. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these items…
- Visits: Also known as “hits,” or the number of times people came to your website. This is a total number, so it includes multiple visits by the same person
- Unique Visitors: Each individual visitor is only counted once in this total, so this number will be smaller that the total number of “Visits”
- Average Pageviews: This is simply the total number of pages viewed divided by the total number of visitors. The higher the average pageview is, the more people are looking into the content on your website
- Time on Site: While this doesn’t say “Average Time on Site,” that is exactly what it is. Like pageviews, the higher number the better
- Bounce Rate: Your website’s bounce rate is calculated by the percentage of total visitors who either 1) only visit the home page or 2) leave the website within roughly 1 minute of entering. The lower the bounce rate the better. A website’s bounce rate will tell you how good the quality of the traffic is. Are you getting a lot of traffic, but you have a 75% or higher bounce rate? Well then one can conclude that the the quality of your traffic is poor
- Map Overlay: This tool is not accessible on the Visitors Overview page, but if you look in the left hand navigation you’ll see it. The map overlay is important even if you’re a local practice. You can dig deep, past the country data, and past the state data, to see which cities visitors to your website are coming from. Furthermore, each city will provide specific statistics about unique visitors, average pageviews, bounce tare, etc.
It is very important to understand the Visitor traffic analytics on your website. This data will help you make decisions about your day-to-day operations and marketing efforts. For instance, if your ‘Bounce Rate’ is really high then you would want to see what’s causing that. It could be something as simple as a broken link, a form that doesn’t work, or even a simple typo. Also, if your practice is in a major metropolitan (let’s use Dallas as an example), but you notice that your traffic is coming mainly from surrounding areas (such as San Antonio or Houston), then you might want to optimize more for your city. I would recommend writing specific blog articles that use the keyword “Dallas” in them. These are just a few examples of how you can interpret data and make improvements to your website and/or blog.
If you have any questions about the Visitors section of Google Analytics, or you would like clarification about anything discussed in this blog article then please contact TRBO ADvance today, or call 877-673-7096 x2.
