Tracking website performance and identifying opportunities for improvement is the first step in conversion rate optimization.
This activity is best accomplished with the help of a web analytics tool. Despite the fact that there are a plethora of online analytics tools accessible, Google Analytics (GA) is the most extensively used across all websites due to its comprehensive reporting system and free availability.
Google Analytics provides a plethora of indicators and characteristics for evaluating your website (and its individual pages). Not all of the Google Analytics metrics and dimensions, however, will be relevant to your website. As a result, it’s critical that you understand the measurements and dimensions that correspond to your business and end goals.
This will help you better understand the important Google Analytics metrics and dimensions, as well as provide concrete recommendations for incorporating them into your CRO approach.
1. Audience Monitoring on a Website
The following GA metrics can be found here:
Overview of the target audience. Users The number of unique visits to a website is calculated using this measure. The entire number of sessions is accounted for by these unique visitors.
While the number of visitors to your website grows, ensure sure the number of users grows as well.
2. Newcomers to the Site
This measure displays the number of people who visited a website for the first time within a specified time period.
Consider the following scenario: you’ve been using Google Analytics metrics and dimensions to track your website’s data for the previous 30 days. Users who visit your website for the first time in the last 30 days will be recorded as new visitors, even if they previously visited your site.
A growing number of new visitors means that a website can now reach a larger number of people than before.
This measure is extremely important for websites like eCommerce. eCommerce websites with a higher number of new visitors have a better chance of converting more people into customers. However, it’s worth checking to see if the revenue amount is increasing in tandem with the number of new visitors.
It’s also crucial to determine whether your new visitors are coming to your site organically or via online ads. It’s easier to get new visitors with web ads because they reach a big audience. However, if your website receives a large number of new visitors organically, it means you have a strong search engine presence.
3. Returning Guests
The number of users who have visited a website more than once in a certain time period is represented by the returning visitor’s measure.
Returning visits show that more people are enjoying the material on a website and are coming back to look at it again. Returning visitors can be thought of as a website’s dedicated audience.
Returning visitors might sometimes be more important to websites than new ones. The reason for this is that returning visitors are more likely to convert than new visits. Returning visitors may indicate that more users are returning to explore the site’s content, implying that the website is gaining more trust and recall.
4. Channels of Traffic
Here’s where you can find traffic for your website: Channels > Acquisition > All Traffic You may locate the higher-performing channels by looking at the data for your website’s traffic channels and promoting them in future promotions.
5. Traffic from natural sources
Users that arrive at a website via a search engine results page are referred to as organic traffic (SERP).
Growing organic traffic indicates that a website’s visibility in search engines is improving. It’s a useful metric for determining whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.
However, because SEO tactics can take longer to produce results, you should track your organic traffic for a long time (weeks or months).
Google Analytics allows you to generate graphs based on hours, days, weeks, and months to detect trends in website data. To detect micro-and macro-trends while looking at organic traffic statistics on a graph over a lengthy period of time, you can flip between day, week, and month.
6. Traffic from Paid Search
Users who visit a website after seeing it advertised on a search engine fall into this category. Make sure your paid search traffic is properly seasoned on the landing page.
Your search ad landing page should be optimized to help people progress further down the conversion funnel. A landing page should be short, targeted, and conversion-oriented, according to best practices.
A/B testing variants of your landing page to see which one is preferred by visitors is a good technique.
7. Traffic from Referrals
Referral traffic refers to visitors who arrive at a website by clicking on links from other websites. You can tell if backlinks are helping your audience or not by looking at referral traffic. You can also discover the main traffic sources for your website.
On GA, referral traffic can tell who your website’s fans are.
If you want to form partnerships or affiliate programs with other websites, you can look at referral traffic sources to figure out which ones to contact. You can also discover and disavow spammy referral sources from which you do not want your website to be linked.
8. Email Visitorship
Users who visit a website after clicking on links in emails are known as email traffic. This dimension can be used to understand more about the performance of your email campaigns than just open and click rates.
Even if an email has a high click rate, you may check to see if users visited the linked page. You can determine whether users stayed on the page and converted using analytics such as average time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. At the end of the day, it’s genuine conversions that ring the cash registers, not opens and clicks.
9. Traffic from social media
Users that visit a website via social media links are known as social traffic.
The amount of social traffic a website receives can be used to assess which social media platform is most effective. You can focus more on the social channels that are directing the most users to your website (those with a high time-on-page and a low bounce rate).
You may also see if a social media platform where you’re putting time and effort isn’t bringing in the expected level of visitors.
Following that, you can devise a strategy for resolving the issues with the social media channel (or minimize your efforts on the channel).
- Organize Traffic
Direct traffic occurs when people arrive at a web page by inputting its URL into a browser, clicking on a saved link, or clicking on untagged links from email or social media.}
Caveat: In Google Analytics, social, referral, and other types of traffic may appear as direct traffic in some cases. - Monitoring the Performance of a Website
These metrics will allow you to assess your website’s individual pages. The number of times a web page has been seen by users is referred to as pageviews.
Pageviews show you which of your audience’s web pages are the most popular. With this knowledge, you can decide where to place content on your website to attract the most visitors.
The pageviews measure allows you to compare the popularity of your website’s individual pages. The number of sessions during which a page was viewed at least once is indicated by
- Time Spent on Page
This measure depicts how much time users spend on a website (or web pages). You can determine the average amount of time users spend on your website’s most popular web pages (based on high pageviews).
You can use this method to locate pages with a huge readership but little user engagement. These web pages can be optimized to keep users on the site for a little longer.
You may also compare the efficacy of your online campaigns by looking at the average time on the page. Assume you’re using many channels to lead consumers to a specific web page on your website, such as email, social media, online marketing, and so on. You can determine the channels via which users spend the most and least amount of time on the website. Using this information, you may determine which page and channel combinations have the most potential, as well as which combinations require the most optimization. This knowledge might assist you in deciding on the best medium for your future campaigns.
- Rate of Bounce
A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a website and then leaves without visiting any additional pages on the site. Bounces are defined as all single-page visits to a website.
The percentage of visitors who leave a website after visiting it is known as the bounce rate.
A high bounce rate could indicate that a web page lacks[4] an inviting call-to-action or links to other online pages. It could also indicate that a website’s material is of poor quality, failing to persuade visitors to stay.
The bounce rate can inform you whether or not your internet ads are successful. If traffic from search ads has a high bounce rate, there could be a gap between the ad copy and the web page it leads to.
Your bounce rate decreases when your ad copy and landing page are well-matched.
You can also add more links (or more relevant links) to other websites to lower the bounce rate on your web pages. For example, a blog can include a “related posts” link to its pages to lower bounce rates.
However, a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing for a website. Even if certain knowledge-sharing websites have a very high bounce rate, it may not harm them.
- Rate of Exit
The exit rate is the percentage of people who come to a website and then leave.
Exits, unlike bounces, are counted every time a user leaves a web page, regardless of whether they previously explored other web pages. Bounces are all exits, but exits aren’t all bounces.
The exit rate is linked to a web page rather than a whole website. For instance, if a website has five web pages, each of the five pages will have its own exit rate.
The exit rate is a useful metric for identifying which pages in a conversion funnel are losing users. In a conversion funnel, web pages with a high exit rate require quick improvement.
