Imagine you have a great website with excellent content. You’re getting lots of traffic, and you’re generating leads for your company.
But, do you know what content is converting? Where is that traffic coming from? And how are your visitors interacting with your site? Is there an opportunity to improve your conversion rate?
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides valuable insights into how your website is performing. You can use this information to identify issues and opportunities and improve your digital marketing strategy.
Google Analytics captures information about the number of people who visit your site and what they do when they get there. This allows you to gain insight into your audience’s behavior, including their interests and motivations, so you can tailor your marketing communications accordingly.
It also gives an overview of where visitors come from (e.g., search engines, social media platforms) as well as what devices they use most often when visiting your website – all important factors for developing an effective SEO strategy.
To help you understand how Google Analytics can help you make informed data-driven decisions, here are the top ten Google Analytics metrics those in marketing and sales should know about.

 

1: Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is one of the most important sources of website traffic, since it’s highly targeted and often converts well. It’s also the only source of traffic that Google Analytics tracks by keyword.
Organic traffic is the main source of traffic for most websites; it refers to visitors who reach your site by clicking on a link in the search engine results pages.
Your organic traffic Is important because it’s how you’re found. The majority of your traffic will come from organic searches, and that’s why it’s so important to pay attention to your keyword performance and rankings. You should also pay attention to your bounce rate and conversion rates for keywords, as well as their position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google Analytics does a great job tracking the most important metrics for measuring organic search performance. Here are the basic ones to get you started.

Volume: How Much Organic Traffic?

The first thing to look at is the volume of organic traffic coming to your site. You can look at this from several different perspectives:
Site average: The average amount of organic traffic for all pages on your site for a given time period. This is useful for comparing against other website traffic sources and seeing how much of your overall traffic comes from organic search results. This metric can also help you determine if an SEO campaign has improved your overall rankings/traffic or not. To find this number, go to Acquisition > Overview and click on “Organic Search.”

Users: This is the number of people who visited your website through organic search. This metric gives you a sense of how well your SEO is working over time, and how much traffic it’s driving to your site.

New Users: This is the number of people who visited your website through an organic search for the first time. This metric tells you how many new people are being driven to your site by SEO efforts.
Queries: This metric shows which searches led people to your website and how often each query occurred. Analyzing this data can help you determine which keywords are most popular and how many people are searching for your brand or its products.
Impressions: A metric that shows how often a listing was shown on Google’s results pages. It’s important not to confuse impressions with clicks — these two metrics measure different things. “Impressions” is a number that represents the total number of times a web page appeared in search results, regardless of whether users actually clicked on it or not.
Clicks: This metric shows the total number of clicks on a webpage listing in Google’s results pages, regardless of position.
Average CTR (Click-through rate): Average CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions for your listing. It helps you determine how often people are clicking your link.
Average Position: The average position metric shows where your webpage ranked in Google’s search results pages for a query. This is calculated by averaging the position of all the impressions from search queries that returned your page in the search results.
Sessions: Sessions tell you how many times people visited your website through organic search. This metric tells you how many visits were generated by organic search traffic, and can help determine whether or not your SEO efforts are increasing or decreasing over time.
There are two important sections of the acquisition report to look at when it comes to organic search traffic:
Organic Search: This section shows the total number of people who found your website by searching on Google, Bing or other search engines. You can see how this compares to direct traffic (people who typed your URL directly into their browser) and referral traffic (people who came from an external link). You can also see which keywords they used in their search query.
Organic Keywords: This section breaks down the search terms people used and shows you which ones generated the most clicks, sessions, revenue, and conversion rates (if you have a goal set up). This information can be invaluable in helping you decide what keywords to target with your SEO efforts.

2. Bounce Rate.

This metric tells you what percentage of your visitors leave your site after only viewing one page. The lower the bounce rate, the better! However, it’s important to remember that not all high bounce rates are bad—if someone comes to your blog post and gets everything they need from that one article or page, you don’t necessarily want them clicking around your site for no reason.

3. Session Duration.

This metric tells you how much time users spend on each page of your site, on average. It’s important to keep in mind the fact that a page with a low session duration isn’t necessarily bad—if someone goes directly to the page containing the information they’re looking for, they might find everything they need in just a few seconds then leave.

4. Pages Per Session.

This metric tells you how many pages visitors view during each visit to your site, on average. High pages per session numbers mean visitors are viewing more than one page during their visit—this is usually a good thing!

5. Section: Traffic Type (Social, Direct, Organic Search)

The Traffic Type section is a breakdown of the traffic your website receives from the source. The three sources that Google Analytics tracks are:

Social: Traffic from social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Social media is now a huge source of traffic for many sites, so make sure you claim your profiles and start sharing content!

Traffic From Direct Sources:

Traffic when the user types your website’s domain directly into the address bar or clicks on a bookmark. This does not include traffic from other sites linking to you.

Organic Search: Traffic from search engines that is unpaid and not from ads.

Organic search is the largest source of traffic for most sites.
Organic search traffic comes from people who search Google or other search engines for keywords related to your blog. Organic search is tough because you’re competing with billions of other websites, but it’s also extremely valuable because searchers are actively looking for information related to your blog topic when they find you.

This section provides a quick look at how much of your traffic comes from various sources. For instance, a high percentage of direct traffic might indicate that users have bookmarked your site and return often to use it as a resource.

To be successful as a blogger, you need all three types of traffic working in your favor. If you’re struggling to get readers or make money with your blog, take a look at these four reasons why you might not have enough traffic coming in each day:

1. You don’t have the right social media strategy.

Social media is a major source of traffic for blogs, but only if you have a system that works. You need to understand your audience and know where your readers hang out online, so you can be there when they need you.
For most bloggers, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the go-to places for finding new readers. However, some niches may do better with Instagram or LinkedIn instead. It pays to test and see where your audience is most active so you can use those channels as much as possible.
Once you’ve found the best social media platforms for your blog, it’s time to figure out what type of content works best on each platform. There are articles that are great on Twitter… and others that are better suited towards Pinterest.
You should also create shareable images for your blog posts, so people can share them whether they’re on social media or in an email newsletter.
If you want more traffic from social media, it’s important to have an active presence on the sites where your audience hangs out. This means sharing links to your content along with engaging quotes and images that appeal to the people in your niche.
It’s also a good idea to share other people’s content as well. Perhaps you’ve read a quote on a website that someone else wrote and shared, or maybe you just saw an article that interests you and wants to share it with others.
The more you promote on social media, the more likely it is that new people will find your site, subscribe to your newsletter, and tell their friends about what they found on your blog.

2. You’re not posting enough

If you’re only posting once a week or less, you can’t expect a lot of people to visit your blog every day. It’s not that they can’t find your content — it’s that there isn’t much there to find.
Your readers will lose interest if they come back and see that you haven’t posted anything new in weeks. They’ll start to forget about you and your blog, and then just stop visiting altogether.

3.You’re not using SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important strategies for getting free traffic from Google and other search engines. By making sure every post is optimized for search engines, you’ll be able to get more visitors to your site without paying for ads or promotions online.
SEO doesn’t have to be complicated either. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform, there are several SEO plugins that can help make sure each post is fully optimized for search engines with just a few clicks of

4.You don’t have an email newsletter.

An email newsletter takes time and effort to build, but it’s a great way to get guaranteed readers for each new blog post that you publish. When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they are much more likely to read your blog posts because they signed up specifically to receive them.
Email newsletters are also a great way to get return visitors to your website. Once someone subscribes, they’ll keep coming back as long as they continue receiving something from your site.
It doesn’t matter how well you write — if you don’t spread the word about your blog, no one will ever see it. You need to spend time on marketing efforts such as guest posting, social media marketing and email marketing.

6.Audience Demographics Age and Gender.

Demographics is a set of characteristics that can be used to identify a specific population segment. For example, gender and age are demographics.
So, what’s the point of knowing your audience demographics?
Knowing the demographics of your website visitor will help you understand your audience better. You will know who exactly visits your site, where are they from and how old are they.
You can use these insights to improve your website contents. For example, if you know that most of your audience is from 18 to 24 years old, then you can add more vibrant content to attract them.
You can also use Google Analytics to see how specific demographics are reacting to different parts of your site. Is your target audience looking at the products you offer? Are there certain pages that aren’t getting the attention of one demographic over another?
Knowing this information will help you make smart decisions about how you design and market your website.

7.Time on Page and Session Duration

Time on Page (ToP) is the amount of time a user spends viewing a single page. ToP is different from Session Duration, which is the total amount of time a user spends on your website during a given session.
ToP will always be less than Session Duration, because a session can consist of multiple pages. But if you notice that users are spending very little time on your website, it may be worth looking into why that’s happening. Maybe you have a high bounce rate, or maybe your site is slow and users are losing patience.
While these metrics won’t give you any answers, they can help point you in the right direction to find out more about how the behavior of your site visitors impacts the performance of your website.

8.New Users vs. Returning Users

There are two different types of users that visit your site: New Users and Returning Users.
A New User is someone who has never been to your site before. They may have found you by searching on Google or clicking on an ad, but they’ve never interacted with your website before.
A Returning User is someone who has visited your site before, either today or sometime in the past. If they’ve recently visited your site, they’re considered a Repeat Visitor (more on this below). But if they haven’t been back in a while, they’re still considered a Returning User.
These two metrics work together to tell you what percentage of your audience is returning visitors and how much of it is made up of new readers. The “returning users” number will be lower than the “new users” number, since it doesn’t count people who have been there before. You can divide one by the other to get a percentage.
There’s not a lot you can do to change these numbers directly. You can’t force someone who’s never been to your site before to return, and you can’t make a returning user into a new user again. However, these numbers are still important to track because it gives you an idea of how much repeat traffic you’re getting and if that number is growing over time. It’s also important to keep an eye on this metric when you run A/B tests or other experiments on your website.
You want your returning user rate to be high compared with your new users rate, because that means people are coming back to visit your site over and over again.

9.Section: Device Category (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet)

Another important factor that can help you increase conversions and understand the user behavior is the type of device a user used to access your website. It helps you understand how users are interacting with your website and whether it’s responsive enough to deliver a great user experience across different devices.
For example, if your website is not mobile friendly, then more than 50% of your traffic from mobile devices will leave the website in just few seconds after accessing the page.
Device Category shows you which of your users are viewing your site from a desktop, mobile device (phone or tablet), or tablet.

Why does it matter?
The number of people who own smartphones has grown exponentially over the last few years. With more and more people using their phones to browse the internet, knowing what percentage of your visitors come from mobile devices is integral to creating a website that works for everyone.
For instance, if you have a website that sells products and services, you may want to know how many people are purchasing your products on their mobile devices. You should also think about how easy it is for your customers to navigate through your website on a smartphone. Is everything they need within easy finger reach? Or do they need to zoom in and out in order to see what they’re clicking on? How can you design your site so that it’s easier for mobile users?
If most of your customers are using desktops and laptops, you’ll probably want to focus on how you can improve their experience instead.

Conclusion:

In Google Analytics, you can use Goals to see how well your content is doing, and the Metrics that I have listed help you with that.
You can use Goals to see how well your content is doing, and the Metrics that I have listed help you with that.
For instance, if you have a blog post that gets a lot of traffic but doesn’t seem to convert as well, you can run an A/B test on it to see what changes would make it more effective. You can also set up Goals to activate when certain events happen with your blog posts — like when someone signs up for your mailing list, opens the page or leaves a comment. You can even use Goals to automatically create new blog posts based on a numerical value.
I recommend setting up at least two Goals for each of your blog posts: one for whether someone reads the post and another for whether they take action on it (like signing up for your mailing list). The first goal is fairly obvious, but the second one might not be so obvious at first glance: If someone opens the page, read through it and then leaves a comment, does that mean they’ve read all six paragraphs? Or just two? Either way, this is information you should have about what happens with each post so you can improve it.
In the end, it’s important to remember that the only way to truly know what kind of impact your content has is to use Goals. Move through the steps above, test, and then use what you’ve learned to improve. That’s how you’ll get ahead in Google Analytics.