RELATED: Do I need to set up Google Analytics for my website? How will it help my business grow?
Consider this scenario: You have 2 blog posts. The first blog post receives a 100 hits per day, but all of the traffic leaves your domain within 10 seconds of your website loading in their browser. You have another blog post that gets only 75 visitors per day, but almost all of those visitors spend few minutes browsing through all the other pages or posts on your website. Which blog post will you consider to be more successful, blog post 1 or 2? and why? To compare these results you need numbers, which you can find from the Google Analytics account associated with your website.
What are metrics in Google Analytics?
According to Google, metrics are the quantitative measurement of your data.
"A quantitative measurement of your data. Metrics in Analytics can be sums or ratios."
In simpler words, they are the numbers you need to track to determine if your blog is performing as you want. Tracking these numbers can also help you determine if your blog is performing as it should and if it is reaching its intended audience.
Examples of metrics in Google Analytics include Pageviews, Pages Per Session, and Bounce rate.
How do I monitor these Metrics on Google Analytics?
Once you have deployed your Google Analytics account with your domain, it will take up to 24 hours before traffic data from your website populates your Google Analytics dashboard. Once you see the traffic data flowing into your Google Analytics account, you can follow the next steps to view the relevant metrics you need to know.
We have used screenshots from the Google Merchandise store for this tutorial.
5 Google Analytics metrics to monitor
Now that you have got the desired view as above, you can follow along to see the list of 5 metrics you should monitor in Google Analytics:
- Pageviews
Actionable insight: Publish more often. Aim for at least once a week. This is true for most of the niches. Look at your closet competitor. Try to follow a similar schedule.
- Unique Pageviews
Notice this number is different from the Pageviews. Pageviews shows how many times a page was visited (and includes multiple page views by the same user), while unique Pageviews shows how many visitors visited a page.
Why is it important: This metric tells you how many visitors visit webpages/blogs just once in one section.
Consider a scenario. You open your favorite blog and visit blog post 1. Then you decide to browse through 3 other blog posts on that website. Once you have read the three blog posts, you decide to re-read the first blog post you opened once again. In this case, your total Pageviews will 5, but the Unique Pageviews will be 4.
- Average Time on Page
Why is it important: This metric tells you how much time your visitors spend on your webpages. For bloggers this metric shows how much time the visitors spend reading a particular blog post.
Actionable insights: You can increase the average time a visitor spends on your website by adding visuals, infographics or videos.
RELATED: A Guide to YouTube SEO: How to make video a part of your marketing strategy?
- Bounce rate
Why is it important: This metric shows you the number of visitors who navigate from your website after reading or visiting just one blog post. Ideally, lower the bounce rate the better. A low bounce rate means that the visitor has found a lot of interesting content on your blog and has decided to browse your website before leaving.
Actionable insight: Generate and publish more relevant content your audience will like. Do keyword research to generate better ideas for your blog.
RELATED: Keyword research in SEO
The 4 metrics above could be tracked in the Behavior section of the menu. You could find them by going to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
For the next metric, you need to look under Acquisition as shown below.
- Pages Per Session
To view this metric, you would have to do the following:
From the menu, select Acquisition > Overview
Why is it important: This metric tells you how many pages or blog posts your visitors visited in one session. This metric tells you how engaged visitors are on your website.
Actionable insights: Improve the navigation and design to your website. Also add internal links to your blog post. this has 2 advantages. Human visitors get a change to engage with more of your blog posts while they are reading the original blog post, and the web spiders or bots get a clear path to crawl through other pages of your website.
Conclusion
The aim of this post is to let you confidently manage your Google Analytics. Now that you know the metrics that you need to monitor and have some actionable insights to help you improve them, we hope this will set you on your way to blogging success!
About the Author
Anandi Merchant has been helping businesses like yours navigate the digital landscape and build a stronger online identity using digital services. She uses a multi-channel approach to help grow your business. She can help you take the next steps to build and implement a better digital strategy to help you move ahead. If you need help managing your blog, generating ideas for content or managing your Google Analytics, you can contact her through her website or reach her on Facebook