For monitor site traffic, statistics about which content is the most visited, where visitors come from and what they like, you can use Google Analytics (which you probably already know).
In this post, I’ll show you how to get started with Google Analytics – for beginners.
Add Google Analytics to your website
If you don’t already use Google Analytics, then you first should add tracking code to your website. First, create Google Analytics account (free) – you can create it with your Gmail account.
Then, you create a “New Account” and enter all the necessary information (Account Name, Website Name, Website URL …).
By clicking the button “Get Tracking ID” you will get a code to embed on your website.
If you use WordPress, then often the themes already have the place to paste this codes. If not, the code should be added to the header – before the . If you are not familiar with this, I recommend that someone who knows more about this take care of it (this one time job).
Once the code is embedded, it’s time to wait a while and soon you will see numbers in your Google Analytics Account. If necessary, make sure to add cookie notification.
Monitoring
Once you have an analytics running, you can do your own reports, set goals…
On the homepage, you can find a lot of information:
Sessions: Number of times your website was visited over a certain period of time and includes repeat visitors.
>Users: Number of people that visited your site during the specified time period.
Pageviews: Number of pages that were visited during the specified time period.
Pages / Session: The average number of pages that were viewed per visit.
Avg. Session Duration: Average length of time that each visitor stays on your website.
Bounce Rate: Ratio of visitors who navigated away from your website after only viewing one page.
% New Sessions: The percentage of people who are visiting your website for the first time.
On the left side you have menus (reports):
1 | REAL – TIME
Monitoring analytics in real time. Here you can see how many visitors are currently on your site, which page they are visiting, from where they came from (eg. from Facebook)…
2 | AUDIENCE
Under this tab, you can find visitor information, e.g. the language, the country, the browser through which they come to your site, the operating system they use, how they go through the website …
3 | ACQUISITION
It’s very interesting to check how visitors come to your site. By default they come to your site:
Organic Search (visitors who come to your site through search engines – eg. Google)
Social (visitors who come to your site from social media)
Direct (via Direct Link)
Referral (visitors who come to your site from other pages – via links on other sites)
Referral is so interesting because you can check which pages have a link to your side.
4 | BEHAVIOR
Keeps track of “behavior” of visitors on your site, which pages are most visited, Behavior Flow (eg. where they go after landing page).
5 | CONVERSIONS
Under the conversions, you can find information about the Goals (if you have set them – eg. one goal can be that the visitor on the page stays more than 2 minutes), Ecommerce, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Attribution.
Of course, Google Analytic provides much more, these are just basic information that you can check. You will get the most information by clicking and scrolling through Google Analytics and getting to know basic information first, so you can then quickly see what information you are interested in.
Are you using Analytics, which statistics are the most interesting for you?
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