Do You Understand Your Google Analytics Home Page?

If you have a website, you should have a website analytics software program loaded to track your website statistics. Google Analytics is a free program that adds a small snippet of code that is placed on all pages of a website. It gathers detailed statistics about a website’s traffic, traffic sources, even tracking conversions or sales.

In this post, I’ll cover the “Home Page” overview that you can look at in Google Analytics and in subsequent posts I’ll cover key reports you can view to understand your (or your client’s) website.

To log in to Google Analytics you go to www.Google.com/GoogleAnalytics and you sign in with whatever Gmail address is associated with your account.

When you log in to the Home page you’ll see something like the graphic below:

On the top right portion of the page you can set the date range to whichever time period you are interested in viewing.
“Sessions” means the number of times the website was visited by new or repeat users during the time period you selected.
“Average Session Duration” is the average length of a visit by a user.
“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of people who visited only one page of your website and then left.  How do you determine if your bounce rate is too high or too low?

Typically, a high bounce rate coupled with a low average session duration, is not a good sign. It means people are coming to the website and leaving quickly after viewing only one page. For most businesses, you want people to spend time on your site learning about your products and services and viewing several pages.

“Goal Conversion Rate” is the number of visits on your website that resulted in conversions. What’s a conversion? A “goal conversion” can be defined as whatever it is you want the user to do on your website. That might be filling out a form, reaching a certain page, a purchase, etc. Click here to learn more on setting goal conversions in Google Analytics.

Sign up to this blog to receive alerts on new posts so you won’t miss any of our upcoming Google Analytics articles. You might also want to check out our Google Analytics Cheat Sheet.