The web analytics is great. it opens up a window we bloggers and marketers can have a peek at our visitors and their behaviour.
I was reading a book about sales and marketing online yesterday and somewhere it quotes –
” I was going through my clients’ analytics report and I found the page views were on the downside. I needed to fix that or else I could loose my job”
That’s pure rubbish.
Pageviews are useless. The main thing you should be looking upon is the time spent and bounce rate your site is getting.
No matter how many pageviews you’ve got, your websites’ fate relies upon the engagement.
You could get 10,000 pageviews a month that results in no or lesser conversion. That’s a matter of concern.
When you look at your analytics, make sure you check out the metrics which are connected to your profit.
let me explain to you what google analytics and others as well count as page views.
What are Pageviews In Analytics
Pageviews are tracked when a person lands on your webpage and resides until it is completely loaded. That is known as a hit.
What is Hit ( elaborated )
When you hit the URL “http://bforbloggers.com” you are redirected to the dedicated IP towards which the domain is pointing and that IP is allotted to a server.
As soon as your browser connects you with the server, the server renders the data it’s has stored in the files made by the domain owner and when this whole data is successfully shown to you by your browser, that’s is known as a hit.
All in all, we get that when a hit is made we count it as a Pageview.
Interesting fact – If someone refreshes the same page again in a meanwhile, that still is counted as a pageview.
Now that you have understood what a Pageview is you should be able to make yourself more focused on other things that are more important.
Before moving ahead, you should know what a session is because you will come through this term frequently.
Sessions – A Session starts as soon as a user lands on your page. It means that the moment you landed or visited this page to read my article, a session started.
A session by default is recorded for 30 minutes in google analytics. You can leverage that by visiting the settings in your google analytics account.
A session longer than 3 minutes should be considered valuable. A visitor who is spending time on your blog must be impressed with what you are writing about in most of the cases.
Okay, I get this, but which metric should I consider important?
The most important metric in your google analytics reports are –
- Bounce rate
- Time Spent and Session duration
- Landing pages and Exit pages
- Behaviour flow
- Location
These five reports have everything you will ever need to grow your online business.
A brief description of every term written above:-
1. Bounce rate – When a user visits your website and immediately closes the landing page without any further action like moving on to another page, then that is counted as a bounce. Here’s a detailed guide on how to take control of bounce rate on your website.
2. Time spent – This Data shows you how much the users spend their time once they land on your page. this data is always shown on an average scale. a session duration is much similar to this.
3. Landing pages and exit pages – Landing pages are those pages where your visitor first visit when they come to your site. this can be your homepage or your posts etc. a better way to monitor these pages is google analytics. similarly, exit pages are those pages from where a user leaves your webpage.
4. Behaviour flow – Much similar to its name, the behaviour flow statics shows you the follow of your incoming traffic. this includes the complete follow up and the report of a user and it’s behaviour starting from the landing to exit page.
5. Location – no need to mention that this data is base on the user’s location. it shows you where do your users come from and this data is to be considered very important especially for websites which aim to target local regions and country-specific audience.
These 5 statistics show you the most valuable and actionable data. if you are not monitoring the bounce rate on your website, you will eventually lose your rankings in SERPs and customers as well. similarly, if you aren’t doing anything to increase the engagement and interaction on your blog, you will fail to build an online community.
It is always a good habit to monitor how your visitors move throughout your website. after analysing a little you can make necessary changes that can help you build your mailing list. if a user is spending more time on your blog rather than your sales or lead pages, it is better to place a lead-form there. That’s how analytics, its analysis and interpretation work.
You have to be actionable with what data is shown in google analytics. This helps you to build a strong web presence with ease and less competitive because you are doing this the right way and Google respects this very much from the beginning.
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