When discussing website traffic, a point that comes up often in conversation with clients, most small business owners have no idea how many hits their site is getting. Or they have a 1990’s-era hit counter on the bottom of their page, which is totally useless. It’s time you learn about web analytics- the process of measuring your web site traffic, analyzing the data, and making changes based on the analysis.

Google Analytics is definitely the most widely used web analytics application, and the best part is- it’s free to use! (Note: Google Analytics is pre-installed on every website Fantastic Edge Marketing produces for its clients.) From a marketing standpoint, it is a very powerful tool.

Did you know that Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports that will help you analyze all possible data about your website traffic. It not only tracks visitors to your site or the number of page views, it can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, Adsense and emails and much, much more.

Here’s a quick reference for the important terms to know:

Unique Page Views: A rough measure of how many people actually visit the site.
Page Views: The total number of pages viewed.
Average Page Views: The average number of pages viewed per visitor.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who view just one page and leave.
Average Time On Site: The average time a user spent on the site.
Direct Hits: People who were not referred to the site; they typed in ‘www.3232design.com’ into their address bar or used a bookmark.
Hits: That’s you.
Hit Feeder: That’s where you clicked the link to get here.
Repeat Traffic: Anyone who has previously visited the site and not cleared any Google cookies.

Here’s Google’s own Guidelines to interpreting GA Reports where you will learn the best practices for analyzing data, how to analyze data trends and how to use the data visualizations in Google Analytics.

Need help setting up Google Analytics on your site? Contact us to find out how we can help.

Sharing Is Caring!