The amount of data you can get from Google Analytics is invaluable.
This free tool offers a considerable number of metrics that you can track to learn more about how successful your marketing efforts are.
But where should you start?
What should you measure and how?
To make the most out of Google Analytics, you’ll need to hand-pick the most important metrics that will provide you with vital insight into your performance.
This article will help you get a better understanding of Google Analytics metrics.
What Is a Metric in Google Analytics?
Say you’ve started a new website and you’re wondering how many new customers you’ll get through it. You may figure out an approximate number based on the number of new orders, but how can you tell for sure?
By tracking certain metrics and setting goals.
In Google Analytics, metrics are quantifiable measures that you can track to assess how successful you are at a specific process within a specific time range. The metrics are related to your website and cover a lot of aspects of its performance, such as:
- Sessions: how many visits your website receives
- Pageviews: how many pages in total your visitors view on your website
- Users: how many unique visitors come to your website
- Average time on page: how much time users spend on your website on average
- Entrances: through what pages your visitors come to your website
- Exit rate: the rate at which users leave your website (for each page individually)
- Bounce rate: the rate at which users leave your website without taking any action
What Is a Dimension in Google Analytics?
With Google Analytics dimensions, you can gather even more precise and valuable information about your website’s performance.
For example, you may have found out what page on your website has the highest bounce rate, but if you learn more about it, you may be able to make a few tweaks and improve your performance.
You can easily do that by pairing the metric with a dimension.
Dimensions are attributes you measure the metrics against. So, to learn more about your bounce rate, you can measure it by channel. To learn more about your users, you can measure the metric users by location. Pageviews by device, sessions by page, and more.
You can typically see this data in a table format in your Google Analytics dashboard. The dimensions are displayed in rows, and you can see the metrics in column headers.
How Tracking Metrics Helps You Boost Your Efforts
Tracking selected metrics in Google Analytics helps you learn the following 3 things about your website:
- If your website is growing and at what pace
- If your website is converting and what its conversion rate is
- What people are doing on your website
When you know this information, you can identify weak points more easily and focus your efforts where it matters the most.
Track Your Way to Success
Metrics in Google Analytics provide you with information on how people reach your website and how they behave on it. And since there are thousands of metrics available in this tool, it’s critical to choose the ones most suitable to track.
By measuring the correct metrics and pairing them with specific dimensions, you can quickly find out what you’re doing right on your website. And just as easily, you can identify the areas that could use some improvement to generate better results.
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By Ashley Sterling
Senior Account Executive
Ashley began her professional career in New York City. After learning everything she could from large-city-living in both New York City and Chicago, IL, she made her way back to her hometown, Albuquerque, NM, and has taken the position of our Senior Account Executive. Her extensive experience in client communication, team development, client success and agency operations make her a powerhouse in the professional world.
