If you have ever jumped into Google Analytics, keen to find out how your website is doing, you may have discovered that it can be overwhelming….! Before falling down the rabbit hole, we’d like to guide you through finding a few simple stats that can give you a good overview of traffic and what is being viewed on your website.
A Few Useful Stats
Analytics can give you all kinds of information (and it can go quite in depth) about what users are doing on your website. But it’s easy to find a few basic stats that are informative. Some of the things that I look at regularly include:
- Users (number of visitors to your site)
- Sessions (a group of interactions in a visit – for example, multiple pages viewed in a visit would count as one session)
- Page views (total number of individual pages viewed)
- Average Session Duration
- Bounce Rate (percentage of sessions on your site where users viewed only a single page)
- Top 10 pages
Have a look at the short video below to learn where you can find these statistics in Google Analytics.
Learn more with LinkedIn Learning
If you would like to learn more about using Google Analytics, LinkedIn Learning offers several online courses from introductory to more advanced. This service is available free of charge to all Carleton staff, faculty and students. Find out more from Learning and Professional Development.
Access your Google Analytics Account
In the past, Web Services has provided our clients with an analytics login. However, with everyone working at home these days we have encountered a few issues. Please have a look at this post, Logging into Google Analytics – the Pandemic Edition, to find out how you can get access.