Data, Analytics, and Metrics: What It Means For Your Business

Before we proceed, it is important to understand your key performance indicators. Find out what metrics reflect the performance of your business. If you’re an online shopping business, leads are important. An increase in leads is good for the business, more traffic coming in to view your products. However, you shouldn’t focus too much on leads. What’s more important is sales. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand visitors that go to your site if none of them buy anything. The conversion rate is very essential because it is what keeps your small business running.

Here are some essential metrics to look for with all the information being fed to you:

Pages/Session (Interactions Per Session)

Businesses’ goals are to have heavy traffic (high count of sessions) and high conversion rate. However, those two metrics shouldn’t be the only things you should be looking at. It is also very important to look at Pages/Session. This feature shows how the visitors interact with the website. This gives you an idea of their behavior. To see the data for this metric, just click on Audience then select Overview.

For example, it shows you what page do they usually go to and what do they do once they’re on that page. Understanding these behaviors could guide you to make more of those pages, pages that are interactive for the visitors and could lead to a higher conversion!

Bounce Rate

This category measures how long does it take on average for a visitor to leave the site once he/she gets gets there. To see this, you could click on Acquisition Menu and then go to Overview. This page will show you the metrics for sessions, bounce rate, and conversion.

This is indicative of the quality of your traffic source and how effective your landing page is. There are a lot of reasons why visitors leave a page once they get there: it could be unorganized, unattractive, or too long to load, among many other reasons. As a business owner, it’s in your best interest to have an effective website that has a low bounce rate.

Traffic Sources

It is critical to determine where your visitors are coming from and understand what they are looking for. You want diverse sources of traffic for your website. In Google Analytics, you could do this by going to the Acquisition Menu. There are 3 main categories of Sources which are:

1. Direct Visitors – These visitors are the ones that input your website URL to get to your website
2. Search Visitors – These visitors are the ones that got to your website by typing in keywords in search engines and then the search engine gave them the website
3. Referral Visitors – These visitors ended up in your website through a mention from a different site, these referrals could be blogs, forums, etc.

This information is also very helpful when determining where your SEO stands. Having a lot of search visitors means that your website is showing up in search engine results, while having a lot of referral visitors mean that your business is getting mentioned a lot in comments, blogs, and/or forums. Based on this information, you can recognize where to focus when it comes to your digital marketing efforts.

Exit Page

Often confused with bounce page, exit page is very different and unique. Unlike bounce, exit page is the page wherein the user leaves the website after browsing through multiple pages. On the other hand, bounce page is the page the user lands on and leaves right away. If you have an ecommerce website, your goal is to have the “Thank You – Receipt Page” as the exit page of every visitor. A metric like this helps businesses figure out where people are leaving the site from. From there, they can study and find out WHY they leave the website from that page. Is there something on that page that discourages the buyers from buying a product? Or is the content lackluster?

To get data for this metric, all you have to do is click on the Behavior Tab, select Site Content and then choose Exit Pages. Just like that, you could see where the visitors leave your website. Isn’t it amazing how powerful Google Analytics is?

Cost Per Conversion (Google Data Studio)

Another very useful metric is Cost/Conversion. Having a high conversion rate is one of the highest priorities most businesses have. However, having a high conversion rate doesn’t always mean that the business is making money. This is where cost per conversion comes in. This metric measures how much on average it costs for each conversion to occur. It’s the relationship of how much the advertisements cost compared to the overall success rate of said advertisements in conversions. Your goal is to have a low cost per conversion metric, meaning you don’t spend a lot of money to convert visitors into buyers.

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